


The Ghosts That We Knew

by fiorediloto



Series: The Earth Below My Feet [5]
Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Established Relationship, First Time, Internalized Homophobia, Jealousy, M/M, Missing Scene, Paris (City), Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:14:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27060088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorediloto/pseuds/fiorediloto
Summary: “I’m making it back to Aldbourne to look up a certain young lady,” Nix had announced, producing Dick’s pass like a magician. “You, my friend, are headed to Paris.”Dick had felt a sour taste spread at the back of his mouth. He’d said nothing, partly because Harry was there, partly because he genuinely couldn’t think of anything to say. They had never promised—No, that wasn’t true. Nix had said “unconditional surrender”, but Nix said things all the time. He’d probably meant it then, but this was now, and now he was looking at Dick with a straight face and a strange, final intensity to it, like this—Dick vacationing in Paris alone, and Nix looking up his young lady in Aldbourne—was the inevitable endpoint of their relationship, and he simply obliged to play the part.Enter Lewis Nixon, seductor of English widows.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Series: The Earth Below My Feet [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1331600
Comments: 36
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [In the Quiet, in the Crowd](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23672182). Much like the rest of this series, this fic is based heavily on Dick Winter's _Beyond Band of Brothers_ and Larry Alexander's _Biggest Brother_ (with some help from Stephen Ambrose's _Band of Brothers_ ). For this part I also used _First to Jump_ by Jerome Preisler (on pathfinders) and might have browsed very lazily through Don Malarkey's _Easy Company Soldier_. The books are treated as fictional works complementary to the TV series. None of this is about the real-life veterans or the people close to them.  
> 
> 
> Thanks to the lovely [Lysel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysel/pseuds/Lysel) for going over my tentative French and to [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/pseuds/Impala_Chick) for beta-reading and doing a great job of it as usual.
> 
> \---
> 
> Title and opening quote from Mumford and Sons' _Ghosts That We Knew_.

_But hold me still, bury my heart on the coals_  
_And hold me still, bury my heart next to yours_

  
  
  


**_23 December 1944, Bois Jacques_ **

On the day before Christmas’ Eve, for the first time in over a week, the sun dawned on a spot of clear Belgian sky.

A few hours later, the same spot of sky filled with a flock of colorful canopies, each with its crate of supplies attached: yellow chutes for equipment, blue for rations, white for medical, red for ammo. Jeeps and trucks rushed in to pick up the bundles and cart the godsend off to the sorting stations.

Nix couldn’t claim that he’d had special intel on this one. With the supply lines severed and the Allied perimeter around Bastogne ever shrinking, the whole regiment had taken to checking the sky at intervals, silently willing the fog to disperse. Just a matter of time, the officers told the men and each other. Nix had been, however, among the first to hear the news, since he’d been at regimental headquarters when the radio message had come in. He’d stuck around for a while longer to finish his business and then he’d hitched a ride back to the line.

The first supplies made it to the units in the early afternoon. Nix dismounted from one of the last jeeps, trunk and backseat packed full with crates of ammo and B-rations, and headed for the CP tent with a spring in his step. His boots sunk in the night snow, which stuck to his trousers and made them wet. A familiar gust of icy wind welcomed him back.

Dick was giving instructions to Dog Company’s Lieutenant McMillan, Fox’s Lieutenant Nye, and Harry Welsh. The new CO of Easy Company was nowhere to be seen.

They briefly traded looks, then Dick turned his attention back to his officers and Nix trudged through the trodden snow to sit on the collapsed tree trunk which had been Dick’s seat ever since the last field chair had been blown up by an artillery barrage.

A mug sat on the tiny camp table, half full and still exuding faint vapors. Nix suspected that it was the dregs of Dick’s morning coffee, watered down and reheated to fill the stomach after a meager lunch, and felt guilty for the canned beef he’d scrounged up at Regiment.

He lazily answered the men’s salutes as they headed off to see to the distribution. When they were far enough, he pulled the can out of his bag and held it up like a trophy.

“And the Lord said unto them: _Ye shall feast on this bounty of—_ ”, he turned it to check the print, “ _MEAT AND VEGETABLE HASH, and praise the name of thy general McAuliffe, who hath dealt wondrously with you_.”

Dick produced a thin smile. “Not the best place to turn to blasphemy, Lew.”

Nix looked around himself. “What, this frozen hell?” 

“You’ve got to put that back,” Dick said, tipping his chin at the can.

“It’ll make its way back to you eventually. I’m just saving it the trouble.”

“I mean it, Nix,” Dick insisted. “It needs to go.”

“All right, all right,” Nix gave up, putting the can away. “Let’s have Dominguez work his magic with it. Will it taste more like socks or more like pits, that is the question.”

“You’re in a good mood,” Dick observed, the corner of his mouth curling up minutely.

“Why not?” Dick sat on the collapsed tree trunk next to him, close enough that their shoulders touched. Pity to let the precious body warmth go to waste, Nix figured. “Thought the news would cheer you up.”

Dick made a face. “Ask me again when they’ll have sent us more than one day worth of rations and a bandolier of ammo each.”

“More stuff’s coming,” Nix assured him.

“You think or you know?”

“I know. The beacons are set. They’re flying back every day while the weather holds.”

“If the weather holds,” Dick replied, but he sounded a little heartened.

“It’ll hold. You’ll see, they’ll fatten us like geese. You’ll be _foie gras_ before you know it.”

Now Dick was smiling proper, in his demure way—a real smile, at last, not a grimace.

“Here is where I ask you what that is.”

“A French delicacy,” Nix answered. “Tastes like fat and suffering.”

Dick scoffed softly. “Sounds French all right.”

“You trying your hand at humor, Captain Winters?”

Dick didn’t reply. He already looked a little less gloomy than Nix had found him.

“By the way,” Nix said, dragging his bag onto his lap and pushing the flap open, “ammo and rations isn’t all they sent.” He took out a small stack of envelopes held together by a string. “Mail call.”

“The men will like that,” Dick said, looking rather pleased himself as he stole the bundle from Nix’s hand.

He checked the first envelope, smiling softly at the handwriting, then undid the string and browsed through the other four or five. They were open and stamped with the purple watermark of military censorship, as per usual. Some of the originals had left the States as early as November, judging from the imprinted dates, then must have got trapped in the meshes of V-mail procedures. The 101st had left Mourmelon in a rush; no doubt most of their mail had been sitting in burlap sacks at headquarters, waiting to be redirected to their post.

“It’s good for morale,” Nix considered. “Not as good as a goddamn winter coat, but what can you do.”

“They sent coats,” Dick said, looking up. “Not enough for all, but—” He hesitated. The clothes were already on their way to the men, and if Nix knew Dick at all, the officers wouldn’t get to call dibs, same as they didn’t get to join the chow line until the men had been served. Besides, Nix was a regimental officer, now. It wasn’t Dick’s job to put the clothes on his back.

“Yeah, don’t worry,” Nix said, taking the hip flask out of his ridiculously thin mid-season coat. On a windy day like this it felt like wearing cardboard, but at least, sandwiched between the freezing temperatures on one side and his body warmth on the other, his Vat was always at perfect serving temperature. Thank God for small mercies. 

“Cold hands, warm heart, am I right?”

“More stuff’s coming,” Dick repeated Nix’s promise, following the flask with his eyes. He looked back down at the letters in his lap.

“Did you get something?” he asked.

“Nah,” Nix shook his head.

“Mm. I’m sorry.”

“That’s what happens when you don’t write back.”

He could see that Dick wanted to ask, but he wouldn’t, which suited Nix just fine, since he didn’t want to talk about it.

The last envelope in the bundle was not standard V-mail. It was a plain tan envelope with Dick’s handwritten name, rank, and unit; it was not open, nor did it carry a censorship stamp.

“That little odd bird popped out of a mail sack this morning,” Nix explained, pointing at it with the flask. “I reckon it should’ve gone through the grinder, but I stumbled on it first. I figured—”

“You’d save it the trouble?” Dick rebutted. If he didn’t find the story of Nix accidentally stumbling on his mail very plausible, he was gracious enough to let it slide. He didn’t look very concerned by Nix aiding an obvious drop in censorship standards, either. They both had censored high enough heaps of letters to know that something always managed to slip and fall through the cracks. 

“I’m sorry. I know how much you like reading around the cutouts.”

“Honestly, Nix, one has got to wonder why you gave up a lustrous career in the MPs to jump off planes.”

“There’s that humor again. I’m watching you.”

Dick smiled faintly. He pulled the letter out and browsed through it quickly. Nix spied on Dick’s expression from above his flask, taking in the way Dick’s smile grew first, then turned somber, almost wistful towards the end. Something twisted unpleasantly in Nix’s guts.

“Bad news?”

“Hm? No. Good, actually. Just—” Dick frowned. “He got me thinking.” 

_He?_ “Dangerous hobby, that.”

Nix took his cigarettes out of his pocket, counting. He was down to three, and only thanks to an uncharacteristic show of restraint, but he figured with the air supplies coming and all, it was cause enough for a little celebration. He lit himself one, barely feeling the paper between his chapped lips.

“Long as it’s not some heartbroken trooper you fucked in Paris,” he warned, voice dropping to a mumble around his cigarette.

Dick looked at him sideways through his eyelashes and clucked his tongue. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“You wouldn’t shut up about that hot bath. One has got to wonder, were you _alone_ in that tub, or—”

“Lew,” Dick stopped him, eyes gleaming softly.

Nix leaned back. As the cold seeped in through his clothes, he was quickly starting to miss the four walls and heated rooms of Regiment. But soon the sun would set, and as unpleasant as that thought was, it brought the minor relief that then he’d manage to drag Dick back to his foxhole for an hour or two. They could sit away from the wind, share some warmth, and pretend they were somewhere else.

“It’s from Don,” Dick said. “Rothwell.”

“Moore’s friend? Pathfinder?”

“The same.”

Dick handed over the letter. It was one page, filled on both sides with a quick longhand. Nix shook the sheet to straighten it and held it up to read.

  
  


_December 21, 1944_

_Dear Dick,_

_I hope this finds you well._

_I’m “okie-dokie”, or that is to say I was until this morning, when we were told to pack our bags and wait for instructions. I will say no more in case the Krauts are reading, but I will say this: if all goes well, this letter won’t be the only thing finding you._

_W. sends his love. He’s well and getting stronger every day. Did you know that he’s running again? He says by the end of the war, he’ll race us all to the top of Currahee. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? Bunch of crazy vets doing the old three miles up, three miles down. I wonder what the rookies would say._

_The truth is, I was damn relieved to read all that good stuff in his last letter. He’s been down in the dumps ever since he went back (you didn’t hear it from me). By the way, he’s got a new address, I’m copying it for you at the bottom. If you can spare the time, he’ll love getting a letter from you._

_Who knows, maybe after the war we’ll all get together stateside, you and me and W. and your friend, and we’ll hang out and have dinner and do all the normal things normal folks do. I don’t know about you, but I sure would like that._

_You hang tough in there, O.K.?_

_Your friend,_

_Don_

  
  


Nix silently returned the letter. It had triggered a soft, dull pain in his chest, and even though he had meant to save every last drop of Vat and savor it like a prized vintage, he weighed the flask in his hand and took another quick sip just to chase away the feeling. As far as dangerous hobbies went, it was still miles safer than thinking of home.

“They’re out there,” Dick commented, folding the letter away with a stiffness to his fingers that to the casual observer might have looked just like meticulous care. He looked up at the glorious blue sky as if he could already spot the second wave of C-47s. “Operating the signals.”

“Safer out there than here with us.”

“You’re here with us,” Dick observed.

“Right where I’m needed.”

Dick turned to look at Nix, his mouth doing one of those weird little numbers of his, simultaneously pouting and smiling. “You know I wouldn’t think any less of you if you spent more time at Regiment.”

“Right, ’cause I’m here freezing my ass off to impress you,” Nix retorted with an eyeroll.

Dick nodded in quiet surrender, like he had the time before and the one before that, and then lifted a hand, cautiously resting it on Nix’s knee. After a surprised second, Nix placed his hand on top of Dick’s.

It was one of those moments of eerie, otherworldly silence that the Bois Jacques offered sometimes. The whole forest went quiet and still, as if all the trees in it were holding their breath in awe of their impudence.

Nix closed his fingers around Dick’s and let his head fall gently to the side, until their helmets met with the softest clang. It was uncomfortable but also peaceful, and he caught himself thinking that if they just sat there for a long enough time, hypothermia would strike and eventually their bodies would freeze completely, their ungloved hands joined forever in a clunky ice sculpture.

Then Dick took a deep breath and just like that, the whole forest came back to life. Somewhere amidst the trees someone cursed, someone called someone else’s name, someone shouted orders in a rough voice, the sentence broken in half by a bout of coughing.

Dick stood up and thrust the mail bundle inside his coat. He stomped his feet on the muddy snow to wake them up and stuck his hands deep inside his pockets, balling the inner lining in his fists.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said. “See how the boys are doing.”

Nix nodded and started to push himself up on his feet. “Sure, I can—”

“It’s best if we keep alternating,” Dick replied, eyes flickering morosely down and then back up, a not very subtle code. Nix fell back on his ass.

“Good idea,” he said. “Keep ’em on their toes.”

“I’ll see you at dinner.” Dick patted the bulge in his coat. “Thanks for these, Lew.”

“Yeah, don’t mention it.”

Alone in the forest, surrounded by familiar ghosts, Nix let out a sigh and headed for his foxhole.

  
  
  


**_Paris (I)_ **

By the time Dick reached the esplanade at the base of the Eiffel Tower, Paris was finally starting to grow on him.

Something about it had been subtly repelling him from the start. He’d never been much for big cities with air pollution and leaden skies, preferring the quiet comforts of small country towns, even the ravaged Dutch ones with the hungry kids and the torn orange sheets at the windows. A subtler part of it was that here all the familiar things looked wrong, standing out at every corner like eyesores in a way they hadn’t in Holland: the American military vehicles, the stars and stripes, the sea of uniformed personnel pouring noisy and rude into all the cafés, all the attractions. Strolling into Place de la Concorde at the tail of his guided tour, he’d felt like an invader, and a bored one to boot. The guillotine history lesson that had delighted some of his tour companions, sparked no more than lukewarm interest in him. 

He’d ditched the group after the mandatory photo in front of the Arc de Triomphe, and good riddance. Walking alone had soothed his anxiety and reconciled him with the city, which—Allied trucks notwithstanding—was quite a sight, awake and alive like a beehive under the morning sun.

At the Tower, he eyed a sign announcing proudly in French and in English that the lifts were out of order. The cables, it said, had been cut to force Hitler to climb up the 1,550 steps to the top platform if he wanted to enjoy the view (he hadn’t). Dick had had mixed feelings about visiting the Tower, but the sign drew a smile out of him, and so in he went.

Dick gravitated around the English-speaking guide for the introduction, but when the lady started listing numbers—how many tons, how many metal parts, how many rivets—he got bored and wandered off towards the staircase.

The climb to the first platform was almost crowded. The air up there was nice and fresh but the view underwhelming. At this level, he could tell by eye that they were just a little lower than the jump towers at Fort Benning.

He paced himself not to break a sweat, enjoying the progressive thinning of the crowd, the dimming of the chatter and the noise. After the second platform, it was only a small group of stubborn tourists venturing up the remaining eight-hundred steps. Dick stopped briefly on the second level to glance out of the windows, then marched on. After ten days idling about in Mourmelon-le-Grand, he welcomed the light exercise, even better since it served a purpose. 

He reached the top platform with breath to spare. From there the view was admittedly awe-inspiring, though not as thrilling as standing in the door of a C-47. It was quieter without the rumbling of the engines and the mad roar of the wind, and Dick suspected that anybody who was not in the Airborne would think him crazy for saying it as if it was a bad thing. Out on the balcony it was cold too, the breeze crisp but unthreatening. He leaned on the railing and took a deep, refreshing breath.

Down on the ground, the Tower cast a long shadow across the Seine all the way to the Right Bank, thick and dark like a mournful armband.

Maybe the thing with Paris was that it hadn’t been Dick’s idea. He’d needed a break, that much was true, but he would have been content hitching the thirty-minute ride to Reims to see the USO shows with Harry. In a pinch, he wouldn’t have minded terribly staying in Mourmelon and getting some rest, though he could already imagine what his friend back home would have said to that, when he wrote her about it. Some spirited sermon about missing chances and not living his life to the fullest, probably.

Nix would’ve agreed with her. Getting Dick to Paris had been _his_ idea, and indeed his fixation ever since the 4th Infantry had liberated it in late August. Dick suspected that he’d started plotting this 48-hour pass ambush the very moment the swastika had been taken down the Eiffel Tower.

“I’m making it back to Aldbourne to look up a certain young lady,” Nix had announced, producing Dick’s pass like a magician. “You, my friend, are headed to Paris.”

Dick had felt a sour taste spread at the back of his mouth. He’d said nothing, partly because Harry was there, partly because he genuinely couldn’t think of anything to say. They had never _promised_ —No, that wasn’t true. Nix had said “unconditional surrender”, but Nix said things all the time. He’d probably meant it then, but this was now, and now he was looking at Dick with a straight face and a strange, final intensity to it, like this—Dick vacationing in Paris alone, and Nix looking up his young lady in Aldbourne—was the inevitable endpoint of their relationship, and he simply obliged to play the part. _Enter Lewis Nixon, seductor of English widows_.

Tower tickets weren’t cheap, so Dick lingered at the summit and put his time to use by impressing the major landmarks of the city in his memory. If he squinted, he could locate the Red Cross club where he’d checked in, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. That, too, had been Nix’s doing. When he’d turned in at the central registration bureau, he’d found that the A.N.R.C. already had a reservation under his name. Unperturbed by his confusion, the WAC behind the counter had thrust a city map into his hand and pointed him in the right direction.

Once he made it down to the esplanade, Dick was getting hungry, so he stopped at a café-tabac on the riverside and ordered a _croque monsieur_ and a coffee. The toast was all right, though very light on the ham; the coffee nothing but a drop of dense, creamy fuel that felt like a slap and lasted him all of ten seconds.

It was still early, so he continued down the riverside and crossed over to the Right Bank at Pont Royal, finding himself to be one of the many uniformed tourists strolling around the Tuileries gardens. From there he emerged back on Place de la Concorde, and found that he liked it better the second time round, with no guide and no group, though the majestic, oversized square continued to put him off somewhat. 

He entered the Champs-Élysées for more park strolling, pointedly ignoring the couples walking together arm in arm, and then, instead of turning south as he was supposed to, he let his eye be captured by the promising boutique-riddled streets on the northern side of the park. 

On a smaller street called Rue de Penthièvre he stood in front of a hat shop for ten minutes before going in. It took him but a minute to choose the one he wanted, a dark-grey fedora which looked just right, all the while nodding politely at the string of ceremonious French the shopkeeper was throwing at him to convince him—he figured—that it was the look of the century. What was harder was explaining in his broken French that despite the perfect fit, he wanted it one size bigger. The shopkeeper resisted, courteous but doubtful ( _“C’est la taille idéale, monsieur!”_ ), until Dick managed to break through the language barrier ( _“Non pour moi… pour mon ami?”_ ), and the man, pacified, provided as requested.

They’d been advised that handmade French clothing and accessories were expensive, but for once he couldn’t bring himself to care. With his box under his arm he finally headed back. By then, the sun rays had started to bend and the rapidly declining light was bringing out the softer, doleful beauty of the city. Dick wasn’t a man given to poetry, but there and then, alone for a moment in a quiet bystreet, Paris struck a sentimental chord in his usually prosaic heart.

He walked up the creaking stairs of the Red Cross club two steps at a time, the soles of his boots drawing fat ribbons of dust from the martyred carpets that lined the well-trodden steps. In front of his door he hesitated, key in hand, and listened. He thought he heard a noise from inside the room, a soft wooden creaking not unlike the moan of the stairs.

His heart thumped loudly as he opened the door.

The room was empty. His duffel bag sat on the chair where he’d left it, deflated like a balloon. All his clean clothes hung in the wardrobe. The fold of the bed was undisturbed, the bathroom with the clawfoot tub dry and unused.

Crushing his disappointment, Dick put the hat box down on the table, took off his cover, and loosened his tie. He hung his jacket and the tie on the back of the chair and got rid of his boots and socks. He then laid himself down on the bed and exhaled a deep breath.

Apart from the occasional car driving past his window, it was very quiet. Dick closed his eyes, opened them a moment later in reflexive guilt, then forced himself to close them a second time. He hadn’t had an afternoon nap in God knows how long. There was something overindulgent to the habit, too akin to sleeping in; his upbringing rebelled against the notion.

In the end he got up, too restless to force his body still, and decided to take a quick shower to wash off the sweat. The big white towel was the softest thing to touch his skin in a long while.

He was still drying himself off when a sudden knocking pierced the silence. Dick hastily wrapped the towel around his hips and trudged barefooted to the door. Self-conscious of his nudity, Dick asked who it was, but the person on the other side simply knocked again, obnoxiously.

Dick reached for the handle.

“You took your sweet time there.”

Dick’s chest filled with a rush of adrenaline that went straight up to his head like a gulp of strong liquor, dispelling any trace of sleepiness. He pushed it down with all his might, crossing his arms on his chest to keep his hands from reaching out.

“ _I_ did?” he rebutted.

Nix shrugged one shoulder, leaning against the door frame like now that he’d made it there, he was in no hurry to move things along. He looked cocky and smart as hell in his uniform, and for a long, agonizing second Dick wanted nothing more than to push him against the wall across the hallway and kiss that smug mouth to within an inch of his life.

Nix craned his neck forward, dipping his head well inside Dick’s personal space. Dick was hit by a blend of Nix’s minty aftershave, smoke, scotch, all of it immediately tangled with the scent of Dick’s body soap.

“What can I say?” Nix replied, his smirk proof that he knew exactly what was going through Dick’s head. “Traffic on the motorway was hell.” 

  
  
  


**_Early December 1944, Mourmelon-le-Grand_ **

The day Nix got Dick his 48-hour furlough passed in a daze. Nix and Harry left the room, Zielinski came and went a few times, the sun set, the moon came up, and Dick kept moving paperwork from the to-do pile to the done pile without retaining a single memory of its content. 

Eventually Nix resurfaced, as was his wont, eyes gleaming and breath alcoholic despite having lamented for weeks that he was out. He sat on the same chair as he had that morning and interrupted Dick’s work—not that he could get much done with Nix in the room—with a one-sided conversation about Paris: the best places, the best restaurants, the best shows. For one who hadn’t set foot in the city in ten years, he was awfully well-informed on what Paris looked like now, what it had to offer. And he seemed so excited about sharing the knowledge. Drink made him chatty, and some days Dick would find it amusing, even charming, but not today.

For a while he let Nix blabber on, participating with noncommittal, monosyllabic sounds, but from a certain point on he stopped bothering. A slow-cooking anger was heating up in his chest, denser and denser by the minute, and when he felt he just couldn’t hold it in anymore, he stood up and dropped the folder he was holding gracelessly onto its pile.

“By the way, I’m not going.”

Nix stilled, his lips parted halfway through the sentence, his right hand with the smoking cigarette frozen like in a late Renaissance painting.

“Course you’re going,” he replied. “That’s the whole point.”

“No,” Dick said curtly. “I’ll be going to sleep now.” He straightened the pile of paperwork, collected his jacket from the coat hook, put it on, and headed to the door.

Nix twisted in his chair to face him. His frown deepened, his mouth curled down in frustration. “I thought you’d be happy.”

Dick grabbed the door handle, steeling himself before he turned his head towards Nix. “I’ll use the pass, all right? Thanks for that.” And then he couldn’t stop himself from adding, pettily: “Enjoy your time off.”

“Wait. Wait, wait,” Nix muttered, jumping from his chair to throw a hand at the door and push it closed. “Is this about—? What, really?”

“Nix, let go,” Dick ordered.

“Is it about what I said, me going to England and you—”

“ _Nix_ ,” Dick repeated, pointedly.

Nix crossed his arms on his chest and leaned with his whole weight against the door. A slow, pleased smile found its way on his lips, which infuriated Dick even more.

“You think it’s funny?”

“Kinda, yes. Didn’t peg you for the jealous type.”

Dick’s knuckles around the door handle had turned white. “This isn’t a joke to me,” he spat.

The tone seemed to sober Nix up on the spot. The smile dried on his lips and he straightened his back, pulling his body off the door.

“No, it’s not.”

Dick opened the door, but once again Nix threw himself at it. This time the pushback was so fierce that it made the glass pane shake frightfully.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Nix protested. “I promise, in a second you’re gonna feel so fucking _stupid_ —”

“I do already,” Dick snapped.

Nix groaned in frustration. “I’m not going to Aldbourne, you big fool. I’m taking _you_ to Paris. And now you better say _‘thank you, Nix’_ and ‘ _sorry, Nix’_ , ’cause I’ve been working Strayer for weeks to get you that goddamn pass.”

Dick replayed the earlier scene in his mind and saw it all, the strange intensity in Nix’s eyes that he’d mistaken for something else, the hint of a smile that had been tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“But—”

“I couldn’t say it in front of Harry, could I?” Nix continued. “ _Me and_ _Dick will be honeymooning in Paris, we’ll send you a postcard_?”

Dick swallowed. “I thought you meant it.”

“And as a seasoned homosexual, I thought you’d know a cover-up story when you hear one.”

“I’m not—,” Dick started, but he gave up arguing the point. Embarrassment and relief were flooding him equally, and whatever appetite for a fight he’d built in the course of the day, it was gone now. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I misunderstood.”

Nix’s hands wrapped around Dick’s forearms, then slid lower, closing around his wrists. He took a step forward and pressed Dick’s body flat against the door. “So,” he said, eyes sparkling with cautious interest, “you’re jealous.”

“It’s not like that,” Dick stalled, neck turning warm at both the accusation and the sudden closeness. Jealousy was, at the very least, an unbecoming feeling for a grown-up man. His mother used to say that jealousy kills the simple and resentment destroys the fool, and Dick had strived all his life to be neither jealous nor resentful. But then again, he’d never had anyone like Nix in his life.

“What about Poland?” Nix insisted.

That’s what they called their understanding these days, when they had to call it anything at all, this fragile agreement that until the end of the war, they were all in for each other. _Everything_ , Nix had said. _Every goddamn thing._ _Roll in the tanks and call me Poland_.

“We never talked about this. About—others.”

“No, we didn’t,” Nix conceded. He clucked his tongue. “I’ve had chances, you know.”

Dick thought of the British colonel, the way he’d sized up Nix like he wanted to strip him out of his clothes in the middle of the briefing room, but the sweet triumph he’d felt that night, when Nix had turned the man down, was out of reach. 

“I know.”

“Ladies too.” Nix squeezed his wrists a little harder. “I didn’t, okay?”

“Okay,” Dick acknowledged softly.

Nix took a step back. Released, Dick’s wrists tingled softly with a ghost sensation, like wearing invisible handcuffs.

“Perhaps,” Nix said airily, turning to grab his jacket from the back of the chair, “you’ll remember it next time your orderly offers to drop to his knees under your table.”

Dick blinked. Sometimes it was all too easy to forget how observant Nix was, how the tiniest details stuck to his mind like bugs to flypaper. He could mull things over for days, for _weeks_ until he got to the bottom of whatever had caught his attention. Dick had wondered why Nix was so set on dismissing the poor boy every chance he got, but he hadn’t thought of _that_.

“You noticed.”

Nix scoffed. “The way he looks at you? Begging to sit in your lap like he’s a fucking Pekingese?”

“That’s unkind.”

“It’s true.”

Dick took a deep breath. It was a decoy, an obvious deflection. Nix knew he needn’t worry about Zielinski. This was just to even the score: to remind Dick that they both had the chance to screw this up, and he better not think that Nix wasn’t looking.

“I told you once,” Dick said. “I don’t want anyone else.”

After a moment, Nix nodded. “Yeah.” Already he looked a little less tense, less high-strung. Unsmiling still, but soothed. “Yeah, I remember.”

Dick, for his part, felt like something was trying to crawl out of his chest. Perhaps, in the face of all odds, he really could have every goddamn thing: not forever, sure, but for however long they got to be together. Even like this, the thought boggled the mind.

“So,” he said, reaching out to take Nix’s hand. “Paris.”

“Paris,” Nix agreed, lips finally giving in to the familiar smirk. “And we’ll see if we can’t make a civilized man out of you yet.”

  
  
  


**_Paris (II)_ **

“You settle in all right?” Nix asked, peeking over Dick’s shoulder. “You never know what you get with Parisian hotels these days.”

“Beats a hole in the ground,” Dick declared, though that was a severe understatement. The room was huge, clean, well furnished. It had marble floors. He couldn’t help but compare it in his mind with the modest lodgings of that one Scottish trip, and the cheap rooms where he and Wally Moore used to meet.

Nix’s eyes moved back to Dick’s face, the brief hesitation immediately brushed off with sarcasm. “I’d say. Is all this luxury tolerable for our frugal XO?”

There was a nervousness to Nix’s voice, not unexpected but dangerous all the same. A nervous Nix was like a dice roll. _Good_ nervous, and he’d be excited, adventurous, daring. _Bad_ nervous, and he’d turn defensive and lash out. Sometimes, even this late in the game, it was hard for Dick to tell until it was too late.

“Barely,” Dick said, taking a step back. “Come see for yourself?”

Nix followed him inside. He took a few measured steps around the room, appraising it slowly, turning on his heels to take it all in—the furniture, the walls, the stucco decorations on the ceiling—with the meticulous attention of a prospective buyer. He sneaked a peek of the bathroom, humming appreciatively at the sight of the clawfoot tub, and finally turned around to face Dick with a faint smirk plastered on his mouth. He was still wearing his cover, and his duffel bag hung from his shoulder like he was just passing by, and now that the inspection was over, he would just leave the room and be gone.

“Well,” was his final assessment, “I’ve seen worse.”

Dick, who’d followed him around the room two steps behind, now took a step forward. He stopped next to the table, resting his hand on the edge to ground himself, to steel the emotion that threatened to spill into his voice.

“I thought you’d changed your mind,” he said, with as neutral a tone as he could muster.

“What? No,” Nix frowned. “Of course not.”

Dick nodded mutely, casting a glance out of the window. His gut felt heavy with anticipation, every inch of his body being drawn toward Nix as if pulled by invisible strings, but he resisted, wavering, unsure if it was safe to make a move. On the battlefield he would have known. His body would have known, even if his mind faltered.

Nix’s face softened up. “Come on, Dick,” he said. “Don’t go shy on me now.”

“You’re the one standing there.”

“You’re not moving either, near as I can see.”

Which was true enough, but Nix wouldn’t have understood if Dick had explained it.

“I took you to Paris, didn’t I?” Nix said.

Dick swallowed his doubts and closed the distance between them in one long step. Nix was ready; his hands rose to grip Dick’s arms just as Dick placed his on either side of Nix’s neck, mouths meeting so fast that their front teeth clashed. It started too hasty, too much like a bad first kiss, but in a second it molded itself into shape. Nix’s mouth tasted sweet and sour and smoky and entirely like him. It hadn’t really been that long, and war and the Army had taught Dick to do without all sorts of things, but now that he had it, he knew he’d never missed something as bad as he’d missed this.

In a moment they were both panting heavily. Nix’s arm snaked around Dick’s bare waist, pulling their bodies close, one hand spread possessively over the small of his back right above the curled edge of the towel. Dick exhaled sharply as Nix took a tiny step forward and Nix’s groin pressed against him through the thick double layer of the towel. He pulled his head back, just far enough to be able to focus on Nix’s face, which was flushed across the bridge of his nose, his lips wet and plump from the kiss. Water had dripped from Dick’s hair onto Nix’s cheeks, his collar, the front of his shirt.

“There,” Nix murmured, with an amused lilt to his voice. “Not so hard, was it?”

Dick chuckled, chest tight with anticipation. “Poor choice of words.” He leaned in for another kiss. “Bed?”

“Yeah, give me a second. I’ll meet you there.”

“All right.”

Obediently, Dick went to sit on the foot of the bed. Nix dropped his bag on the floor, took off his cover and threw it on the table, then started on the jacket buttons. His mouth curled in a smile when he noticed Dick staring, and from swift and economical his movements turned careful, deliberate.

Dick rested his weight back on one hand and tugged experimentally at the wrapped edge of his towel. When he saw Nix follow the gesture, he pulled the bundle undone, placing one corner of the towel modestly on top of the other. 

Nix’s tie slid off his collar with the sharp hiss of a whip.

“Open it,” Nix said.

The order went straight to the hot tangle inside Dick’s guts. He unfolded the two wings of the towel on either side of his thighs and waited.

Nix pushed down his suspenders and pulled out the tails of his shirt, flicking one button open after another. Dick was half-hard; his cock twitched with renewed interest when Nix undid the top button of his trousers and kneeled down to untie his boots.

“Go on. Show me,” Nix said, never breaking eye contact, voice made lower and deeper by the knee pressed to his chest.

Dick took his cock in his hand and gave it one long pull, exhaling softly as he did so. He wrapped the ring made of his thumb and index finger around the head, letting the foreskin slide back and forth at each pull. His cock immediately grew heavier and fuller under the attention.

Still half-kneeling on the floor, Nix’s eyes flickered to Dick’s hand, then back to his face. He looked like he knew exactly what he was doing, but he was in no hurry to get things going. For now he seemed content to watch, his gaze charged and focused.

Dick didn’t feel especially time-pressed either. He’d never done anything like this. It felt strangely exhilarating, doing something so private in front of another man. The physical distance should’ve diffused the charge, but it didn’t. His skin tingled all over under the scrutiny; his ears felt on fire.

“You like it,” Nix said, with something like a careful wonder in his voice. “Me watching.”

Dick ran his thumb over the tip of his cock. The gesture disturbed a droplet of moisture from the slit, soon replaced by another. “Yes,” he answered, easily.

“What else do you like?”

“Anything,” Dick said automatically.

It was the wrong answer. “What else?”

“Come here,” Dick deflected.

Nix reached into his bag, then stood up. He’d kicked off his boots, and the front of his trousers was unbuttoned and open on either side of his visible bulge. It must have started to bother him, but he didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it just yet.

Nix lifted a hand, showing the round yellow tin in his palm, and threw it to Dick.

“Want me there? What for?” Nix teased.

The tin was new, shiny and warm at the touch. Dick pictured Nix’s fingertips breaking the flat, buttery surface and scooping up the jelly. He could smell it in his mind.

“You know what.”

“Then say it,” Nix commanded, voice turning a little raspy towards the end.

Dick swallowed around a lump of excitement. It felt like he hadn’t breathed in minutes.

“I want you.”

Which was true, but still not exactly what Nix wanted to hear. Dick knew what that was. He’d said it times before, earnestly and without a second thought, as easy as shucking off his clothes before a shower. There was no reason why it should be any more difficult with Nix, but really, every single hair on his body stood on end just _thinking_ about saying such a thing to Nix.

“I want you to fuck me.”

The corner of Nix’s mouth curled up in a winning smile, and he finally walked the remaining three steps to the bed. Dick sat up straight to meet him, almost reflexively standing at attention, and placed both his hands on Nix’s hips while Nix rested one of his on the side of Dick’s jaw. Nix thrust his fingers through the short hair behind Dick’s ear and tilted Dick’s face up for a possessive kiss that made Dick’s head spin and his ears ring.

Dick dipped his thumbs in the waist of Nix’s trousers and underpants and pulled them down. Nix sighed through his nose when Dick wrapped his fingers around Nix’s erection.

“Don’t let me screw up this time, all right?” Nix dropped airily, a non-joke, and Dick’s chest suddenly felt tight. He pulled Nix’s undershirt up to kiss his sternum, then rested his forehead there until he felt like he could speak without pouring his heart out. Nix’s was hammering in his ribcage.

“You won’t,” Dick promised, looking up.

Nix combed Dick’s hair back, fingernails raking Dick’s skull in a way that was both domineering and tender.

“So. Shall we?”

Nix didn’t need to worry, of that Dick was certain. He’d meant to tell him, _There’s nothing you can’t succeed at if you put your mind to it_ , but the words hadn’t come out, partly because they sounded like something out of his mother’s mouth, partly because they weren’t true: Nix had ample margins to fail when he was intoxicated, or in one of his dark moods, or both. But he was neither now, if anything he was sharper and hyper-focused, and his eyes and hands and mouth owned Dick’s body like it was a complicated strategy exercise, and something terrible would happen if his attention relented, if a detail escaped him. On a normal day such all-consuming diligence suited Dick more than it did Nix, who even with time to spare was more inclined to playful abandon than study, but Nix was marvelous at everything he did, and Dick wasn’t going to swim against this particular tide.

Except when Nix hooked his arm under Dick’s knee and pushed it up, exposing him, he looked uncertain for the first time, like a traveler who knows the way only up to a certain point and then is lost. And Dick, who at this point was holding on to a thread and wanted nothing more than for Nix to come forward and plunge in, exerted the very last shred of control he had left and shook his head.

“It’s easier the other way,” he said, extricating his limbs from Nix’s to turn around and rest his weight on his knees and elbows.

Nix didn’t need to worry, of that Dick was certain, because he could make Dick melt with a single finger, and Dick had wanted him so badly and for so long that letting himself be claimed was just a matter of course. Close to his ear, Nix let out a long-held breath and then a soft _huh_ , surprised almost, as if he’d braced for a steep uphill slope, but no, there he was already, snugly fitting inside.

Dick bent his head down almost all the way to the bed and waved a little in the lock, needing something to move, and Nix immediately responded with a little nudge forward that felt all kinds of exquisite and made Dick gasp softly in his own hands.

Nix ran his fingers over Dick’s sweaty flank, dipped them down between Dick’s legs to find him almost fully hard again.

“Can you come like this?” he asked, and Dick huffed a breathless chuckle, because boy could he.

“Yeah,” he made it clear, since Nix wasn’t moving, waiting for an answer. “Come on.” 

Nix spread both hands over Dick’s back and curled his fingers around Dick’s hips, forcing Dick’s body to meet him in the next push, and Dick sighed noisily, mouth open, the sound so heartfelt and he so disused to hearing it that for a second he doubted it had come out of him. Nix’s grip tightened in response, fingers digging possessively into the thin flesh around Dick’s hip bones. The low-key pain added to it in ways Dick hadn’t anticipated. Nix rocked forward again, with purpose this time, and that sent a minor shock through Dick’s lower back and down his legs. He curled his toes off the bed, arching his back in an instinctive attempt to direct the head of Nix’s cock right where he needed it, and the next hit was so sharp and so good that Dick felt his head starting to swim. He widened his stance and shifted his left arm to keep his balance as he freed his right hand to wrap it around his cock. A couple pulls and he knew that he wasn’t going to last, but he could afford not to care; he could come now and let Nix finish in his own time, and the thought of exactly that—Nix taking his pleasure from Dick’s lax, spent body—was suddenly enough to push him over the edge. At the very end his body slouched forward, his forehead grinding into the bed as he panted and begged and finished in a mess over the sheets. His left hand snatched backward to hook around Nix’s thigh as Nix drilled on and on and on, a merciless form of perfection.

Nix wasn’t as forceful afterwards, or maybe Dick had lost all sense of feeling for a moment, but he did feel Nix skirt past his oversensitive prostate without quite hitting it, which was good in a completely different way. His hearing was back to normal and he could hear Nix pouring loving, breathless words into his ears as he fucked him, not gently, but with a sort of rough care that Dick would remember later. Nix’s hips snapped forward, once, twice, the loving words melted into grunts, and then it was hot and wet and Nix’s chest slumped heavily over Dick’s back like they’d removed his spine. Dick felt Nix’s rough cheek scratch his skin and pretended not to hear when Nix ran a hand over his side and gasped a few hot words into his shoulder blade.

“Jesus Christ, that was—that was— _Fuck_. I love you.”

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was a guy called Gordon Rothwell who was a pathfinder and jumped on D-Day and in Belgium. It's not this guy.


	2. Chapter 2

**_24 December 1944, Bois Jacques_ **

It was well after sundown when Nix came by for his rounds and found Harry sitting in a foxhole, alone, his back propped up against the frozen dirt wall and his helmeted head slumped to the side.

“Welshy? What’re you doing out here, buddy?” he announced himself from a few steps away, wary and mindful of how dangerous a startled trooper with a bayonet could be. When no answer came, he crouched on his heels by the mouth of the foxhole and tapped his friend’s shoulder. “Come on.”

Harry twisted his head and looked up, scrunching his nose. He looked sleepy, the kind of flat, resigned drowsiness of a man who hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days. Nix felt bad forcing him awake, but it wouldn’t do the man any good to fall asleep this close to the front.

“Mm. Just resting my eyes,” Harry mumbled. As if to prove the point, he rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, viciously enough for them to get even more bloodshot. “They get tired, with the snow and all.”

“They do,” Nix agreed. “You wanna rest ’em half a mile back into the line, though.”

“’s all right,” Harry sighed. “I’m gonna keep them open now.” 

“Right,” Nix said, adjusting the rifle strap around his shoulder and standing up. “You do that.”

He had just started his rounds. Dick had finished his shortly before sundown; they’d met at CP, exchanged notes, spent an hour in companionable silence, and when the wind had started to pick up they’d relocated into Nix’s foxhole to keep themselves marginally warmer. At some point Nix had noticed that he was getting too comfortable, too close to dozing off, so he had shaken himself awake, tucked Dick in, and forced himself to climb out of the foxhole and be on his way.

Alternate rounds were their routine now, born in Holland and consolidated in the forest. Nix thought that he had the sweeter end of the deal, ’cause as far as artillery barrages went, nights were more peaceful, not to mention it was easier to keep your body warm while on the move. But deep down he knew that the deal suited them both equally, and not just because Dick was an early bird. There was a whole different side that the dark wrenched out of men, one that Dick wasn’t fully equipped to deal with: the remorseful, insomniac, petulant side you met only in the dead of night or at the bottom of the glass. Nix had seen it all—the regrets and the what-ifs and the wallowing self-pity—but Dick had no clue what that felt like, and sometimes, against his more charitable instincts, it made him vibrate with impatience.

“Say, Nix,” Harry called, casting him a glance from under the rim of his helmet, “you wouldn’t happen to have a drop of scotch left in that flask of yours, would you?”

Nix shook his head, surprising himself with how easily, how naturally the lie came to his lips, and how little guilt he felt over it. “I wish. I’m out.” 

Which was credible enough, seeing how he’d gotten wasted in his foxhole some three days past, right on time for McAuliffe’s social call. His ears still burned with shame at the memory—how Sink had called him out on his sins in front of the General and everybody else, how Dick had stood livid with discomfort just a few steps behind. 

Meanwhile, Bastogne’s one and only spirit seller had been razed to the ground by a Luftwaffe raid shortly after they’d set up shop in the Bois. You had to give it to the Nazis that they always knew to hit where it would hurt the most.

“Pity.” Harry cleared his throat as if to dislodge a lump of goo, the sound sharp and vaguely reproachful. “I was counting on you getting a nice Christmas package.”

“Ha,” Nix shook his head, “you and no one else, buddy.”

Harry considered him for a moment, then let out a sigh.

The signs of an impending breaking point, Nix thought, were usually subtle at first, as they lurked under the weariness and the hunger and the general discomfort that surrounded all mundane things from darning a sock to taking a shit. And maybe it _was_ just tiredness, but he looked at Harry now and found him uncharacteristically gloomy. It wouldn’t be unjustified, all things considered, but they had all been taking Harry’s good mood and pragmatic optimism for granted, as essential to their continued survival as ammo and food supplies, and to think that it might be waning…

“Tell you what, though,” Nix said, patting his coat. “I stole Dick’s smokes.” He produced a pack of Lucky Strikes, eyeing the torn corner to check how many were left. A modest offer, now that the divisional manna had started pouring from heaven, but you never knew when the tap would run dry.

Harry’s eyes lit up a little. “Never pass on a free smoke.”

“C’mon, walk with me a stretch,” Nix said, reaching out a hand to help Harry out of the foxhole.

They set out at a slow, leisurely pace that wouldn’t leave Harry too far from his post by the time they were done smoking.

“Never been much for Luckies before I joined up,” Nix mused, exhaling a puff of smoke. “I was more of a Philip Morris man.”

“Camels,” Harry disagreed.

“Well, it’s your lungs,” Nix conceded amicably.

Harry looked at the cigarette he was holding between his thumb and forefinger, the lit end burning away the paper and casting a soft glow back on the gloved tips of his fingers.

“That’s something I didn’t think I’d get used to,” he observed. “Luckies.”

“What about exploding trees?”

“Yeah, I don’t recall those on the draft posters.” Harry shook his head. “That kinda sums it up, doesn’t it. Luckies and exploding trees.”

“If we’re making a list, there’s shitting in a bucket,” Nix contributed.

“Shitting in a bucket _four times a day_.”

“Sharing a room with thirty pairs of feet?”

“Well, the smell I can live with. The snoring, though.”

“No, the noise is all right. I could sleep through a bombing.”

“Literally?”

“I did. A few times.”

“Never could do that,” Harry admitted.

“Never? What about France?”

“Well, I slept. Just not through the bombings.”

Harry was silent after that. Nix shook the ash off his cigarette and tilted his chin up, looking idly at the sky.

“The marches,” he offered, to keep the conversation alive. “Thirty, forty miles straight in the same boots. It’s hell, but—” Nix made an empty gesture with the hand holding the cigarette, something that roughly translated as, _You know what that’s like_.

Harry knew exactly what that was like. “But once you’re done.”

“Once you’re done, goddamnit,” Nix chuckled around his cigarette.

Harry sighed an audible, heartfelt sigh that turned into a cloud of vapor in front of his mouth. He still had a half cigarette left to smoke, though the wind was quickly making a dent in it.

“They gave away Philip Morris packs after the shows,” he said. “In Reims.”

“Yeah?” Nix said, searching his memory to realize that what felt like a lifetime ago had been a mere three weeks.

“Yeah.”

Harry’s eyes were cast on his boots; the snow crunched softly as they coasted the edge of the line.

“So?” Nix tried to rekindle the conversation. “How was she?”

“Who?”

“Who, he asks.”

“Dietrich? Boy,” Harry smiled around the cigarette. “Those _legs_.”

When Harry left that hanging, Nix nudged his elbow playfully. “And? Did she just stand on them like a flamingo?”

“She sang, like, half a dozen songs. She played that weird instrument of hers, the thing—,” he snapped his fingers, “the saw. The musical saw. And she did this neat little mind-reading trick. I don’t know how she did it, but it worked every time. She did it on Sink, too.”

“What was he thinking?”

“Apparently,” Harry smirked, “it was too dirty to say.”

Nix chuckled. He could see it all too well, Sink’s cheekbones flushed around his moustache while Marlene Dietrich’s mile-long legs strutted right above his nose, the crowd of GIs in the back seats cheering and wolf-whistling and singing along to the lyrics of _Lili Marleen_.

Kind of a pity, having missed it.

“I would’ve liked to see that,” Nix admitted. 

“Kitty loves her.” Harry kept his eyes peeled on the road.

Nix had a joke on the tip of his tongue—something along the lines of Harry better keep his leash tight, if he didn’t want Kitty to fall for that German lady and her top hat—but Harry’s tone made him think twice.

“You can take the future Mrs. Welsh to the next show.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Hm?”

Harry stopped on his tracks and threw away the cigarette butt. It landed on a little mound of snow, fizzling and carving a tiny hole as it went off.

“I’ll head back.”

“What was that?”

“It’s nothing. Just—” Harry heaved a sigh. “It’s Christmas, Nix.”

“I know,” Nix mumbled.

“Three months ago I thought—not that I’d be _home_ by now, but damn it. That I’d be making plans.”

“So make plans,” Nix replied, a sudden unease lurching in his stomach. “No harm in that.”

“There’s no point.”

At the sight of Harry’s exhausted, dejected face the unease in Nix’s stomach blossomed into a full cramp, like a hand was squeezing and twisting his guts sideways. No, damn it, not Harry. They couldn’t afford it. 

“Welshy, it’s fine. Plans can change. She knows that.”

“Sure, that’s what I’ll tell her. Don’t trust anything I say, honey. Plans can change. Lewis Nixon says it’s fine.”

“Well, she can’t expect—”

“She’s been waiting two years. She can expect whatever the hell she wants.”

“Is that what she said? She wrote you that?”

Harry’s hand, closed into a fist, hit the side of his leg nervously a few times. He shook his head. “She didn’t.”

“Well, then. You see.”

“She didn’t write.” Harry shook his head. “Hasn’t in a month.”

For the first time in a really long time, Nix couldn’t find anything to say.

“Yeah,” Harry mumbled, taking in what Nix hoped looked like sympathy, not pity, on his face. “So.”

“Look,” Nix replied, finding his footing, “they messed up our deliveries. The post office at Regiment? Fucking circle of hell. I bet there’s a burlap sack smelling like a perfume shop somewhere in—”

“Nix,” Harry said quietly. “Leave it.”

Nix swallowed the rest of his sentence and looked away.

“I’ll go back to CP, see if Dick needs anything,” Harry said, patting Nix’s arm in a conciliatory manner. “Thanks for the smoke, buddy.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Later that night, when Harry was taken away on a stretcher, his thigh slashed open by a German mortar round, Nix thought of a handful of Kitty’s letters sitting at the bottom of a sack in Mourmelon, and a flash of pure, white anger choked him.

Kathy’s letter burned in his breast pocket like a hot plate pressed against his heart. 

  
  
  


**_Paris (III)_ **

Dick opened his eyes to find himself alone in bed, his cheek pressed against a pillow that smelled like Marseille soap and hair pomade. He felt nice and rested but also alert, the way he did when a noise had woken him up.

Perking his ears, he heard the sound of water running inside the walls. He looked around in the orange light, surprised to find that the sun was setting. 

For a split second he wondered if Nix had left—but no, his jacket was hanging from the back of the chair, and that was his tan shirt crumpled on the floor. Reassured, he started reviewing the scattered items of clothing to find out which ones were missing, but his exercise was interrupted by the bathroom door opening. 

There he was, completely naked, shaven, his hair damp and combed to the side, a towel slung carelessly over his shoulder.

“Hey,” Nix said, stopping on his way to the bed to drop the towel on the chair and search his jacket for his cigarettes.

“Hey,” Dick said, rubbing his face. “I didn’t hear you get up.”

“You talked to me.”

“Did I? What did I say?”

“I’ll never tell.” Nix looked up, cigarette hanging from his lips, and his eyes fell on the hat box sitting on the table. “You went shopping?”

Dick had forgotten all about it. He hid his smile. “Yeah. Open it.”

“You being a prodigal son as usual, huh, Winters?” 

“Just open it.”

Nix undid the ribbon, lifted the lid, and unfolded the thin wrapping paper which protected the hat. He grinned when he saw what it was. “You’ll have to fend the broads off with a stick,” he declared, picking up the hat with one hand, forefinger on the crease, and placing it on his own head. He ran his fingertips along the brim and turned around.

“How do I look?”

Handsome, desirable, completely ridiculous.

“Like a naked man with a hat.”

Nix snorted and dropped the fedora back in its box.

“I hope you like it,” Dick said. “My French is good enough to buy something, but I don’t know about returning it.”

Nix blinked. “What?” He looked at the hat. “Why?”

“You said you wouldn’t let me pay for the room,” Dick explained. “And short of hiding cash in your pockets...” He shrugged, because he had considered it, but Nix always had cash lying about in his pockets, and Dick doubted that he would ever realize where the money came from—which seemed important, for some reason.

“Huh,” Nix murmured in amazement, picking up the hat again. He put it back on and went to check himself in the full-figure mirror by the door, then—hat still on his head—he walked back to the bed, propped the pillow up against the headboard and let himself flop on his back with a pleased groan. “I think it rather suits me,” he declared.

Dick bunched up his pillow in his arms and rested his chin on it. Nix seemed uncannily comfortable with all of this—the two of them in bed together in plain daylight, naked, in a stuffy room reeking of sex. It was too good, and part of him couldn’t help wondering where the catch was. Had he ever let himself hope for something like this? Had it ever seemed possible?

“What?” Nix asked.

Dick gestured vaguely at Nix’s body. A few water drops gleamed on his chest hair; from there, the hair thinned into a dark, flat trail which dipped like an arrow straight into Nix’s groin. Down between his legs, his hair was all airy and fluffed up.

“Like what you see?” Nix teased, stretching his leg down to offer a better view. His cock rested soft on his thigh, though something about it seemed to promise that it didn’t have to stay that way.

“Very much,” Dick answered, because Nix had said it right earlier that day: it was too late for shyness.

Nix smiled, took a first drag off his cigarette, and exhaled the smoke with a contented sigh. As he turned his head to Dick, he noticed that the other man’s gaze was still fixed on him, and his smile grew a fraction of an inch wider. 

“Want some?” he asked, offering the cigarette.

“No, I’m all right.” 

Inspired, Dick reached out and rested a hand on Nix’s chest. Nix’s skin felt nice and cool under his palm, his hair soft. Dick stroked it gently with his thumb. After a moment, Nix moved his free hand on top of Dick’s and brushed the back of Dick’s fingers with his own.

They stayed like that for a while, listening to the moaning of the pipes, the creaking of the wooden floors around and above their heads, the sparse traffic noise. The mundanity was unreal, and the full, quiet happiness that came with it almost painful, like a tight stretch of fabric bursting at the seams.

Finally, Dick moved his hand away and rolled carefully onto his back. He felt a little tender, a little overused; the lube and sweat and semen that hadn’t been cursorily wiped off had dried up on his skin, and now that he was awake, he felt increasingly itchy and in need of a wash.

Nix was following his moves with amused attention. “Everything all right down there?” he asked, tipping his chin at Dick’s hips.

“Yeah.” Dick stretched and yawned. “I need a shower.”

“Will it be—,” Nix tilted his head, “uncomfortable? Sitting?”

“I don’t think so,” Dick said, pushing the sheets away. The bed was a sorry mess, and he was lying smack on top of it, which was uncharacteristic to say the least. He’d always been so particular, so fastidious about the aftermath, but this time he’d just plunged right into sleep like a spent teenager. A bit disgraceful, really, if only he could bring himself to care.

Nix was still smiling. “Good.”

“Why?” Dick asked on his way to the bathroom. “Are you taking me to the opera?”

“God, no. Nothing that wholesome,” came the reply.

“Hm? What’s that?”

“Don’t you worry your pretty head.”

If Dick had been listening to Nix’s blabberings the day Nix had gotten Dick his pass, now he might have had a clue about their Parisian programme, but he’d been blind and deaf with rage at the time. Now the thought of Nix in Aldbourne with his young lady seemed as far and improbable as the two of them together had been just a few months before.

Dick brushed his teeth and then entered the tub carefully. It came with a graceless curtain—a later addition, probably installed with the shower head—but Nix had managed to make a mess all the same. The floor was covered in puddles all the way to the sink.

“I hope you enjoyed your nap, because you’re gonna miss your nine o’clock bedtime,” Nix’s voice called over the sound of rushing water.

“Yeah? When’s bedtime then?” Dick called back.

“Revoked. Until further orders.”

Dick smiled. “All right, but I demand dinner.”

“Dick, you got it backwards. _First_ you get dinner, _then_ you let ’em take a peek up your skirt. Have I taught you nothing?”

“Nothing,” Dick confirmed happily, and then: “Are we too late to re-establish the proper order of things?”

“Damn it, you know I can’t resist the sweet talk.”

Dick chuckled, closing his eyes under the hot water stream. He didn’t realize that Nix had entered the bathroom until Nix pulled the curtain half-open, head peeking from the side, hat and all.

“You lost something?” Dick teased, brushing the wet hair off his brow.

“Just starting to feel bored,” Nix shrugged. He looked around himself as if he’d just noticed the state he’d left the bathroom in, and made a reproachful clucking sound with his tongue. “Look at this mess. Are you always this careless when you’re on leave?”

“Not when I’m alone.”

“And when you’re not?”

“You tell me,” Dick replied, biting off a new smile.

“Well,” Nix started, gaze stroking Dick’s body up and down like a paintbrush. “I can’t speak for all your secret lovers, but _that_ back there? Pretty wild in my books.”

“What secret lovers? I can barely keep up with the one,” Dick replied.

Warmth flashed in Nix’s eyes, and he pulled the curtain fully open, ignoring the thin water sprays that hit his chest and face when he did so.

“You’re gonna ruin your hat,” Dick warned him, which only made Nix look even more mischievous.

“There, happy?” he said, hanging it diligently on the robe hook. “I need to make sure that you wash yourself properly,” he declared next. “Seeing how time off makes you sloppy.”

“Sloppy?”

Nix showed a cheerful flash of teeth. His smile promised that he had a whole lot of things in store before dinner.

A nasty cold wind welcomed them out of the hotel doors, but they forgot all about it once they walked down the stairs of the nearby _métro_ station. The station was very busy, and their train was equally full of GIs and French men and women making their way home, so they had to stand. The crowd moved around them, pushing them into each other at intervals, and Dick was happy that necessity made the proximity completely innocent.

“What’s our stop?” Dick asked.

“My sister,” Nix answered, confusingly.

“What?” Dick frowned.

“My sister’s name. That’s our stop.”

“Oh.” Dick craned his neck up to scan the map of the line printed over the doors, but nothing looked familiar. “Do I know your sister’s name?”

“You do. It’s not _Philippe-Auguste_.”

“ _Blanche_?” Dick guessed. “Honestly, you’ve never—”

“That’s our girl.”

Dick reached into his jacket for his Red Cross map, but Nix stopped him.

“Leave that thing,” Nix grumbled good-humoredly, pushing Dick’s hand back inside the lapel of his coat. “We’re not tourists.”

“We’re not?” Dick smiled back.

“Well, you are. Me,” Nix smirked, “I like to think of myself as a son who never visits.”

He left his hand wrapped around Dick’s wrist for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and Dick’s grin grew under the attention. They sure were doing a lot of smiling today, both of them, and it was all fine and dandy in a locked room, but now that they were out they’d better be careful. He tried to kill it, but it didn’t work out.

“Maybe I should introduce you, after all,” Nix said.

“To who?”

“To Blanche,” Nix answered. What he said next made Dick’s stomach lurch in a way that was both uncomfortable and expectant. “See if she can’t make you stick around for a while.”

“Stick around where?” Dick asked, feeling a pang of anxiety at the thought that Nix might start _that_ kind of discussion in such an incongruous place and time.

“Lancaster isn’t far,” Nix said obliquely. “And Blanche’s a decent hostess. You’ll see. You’re tall, you don’t smell. She’ll love you.”

“I’m sure she can do better than _‘tall, doesn’t smell,’_ ” Dick replied.

Nix shook his head left and right, like he was considering the point. “There’s that Nixon temperament,” he admitted. “It takes a certain kind of man to put up with it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Dick quipped, and there it was again, the smile on Nix’s lips, warmer and fonder than ever. But maybe it was all right—maybe no one was watching.

Maybe no one cared.

The theater stood right in front of the métro exit, a large building with a whimsical red windmill perched on top of the roof. The posters—some hand-drawn and colorful, some monochrome photographs, all oversized—promised an array of types of entertainment Dick could only vaguely make out, though dancing was obviously a big part of it, and a certain amount of skin was implied in the suggestive poses and the wavy texture of the clothes, which looked ready to fly off the respective bodies at the smallest gust of wind.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

Dick hummed a vague assent. Nix looked excited and proud, like he’d personally discovered the place, although Dick had done his homework and he knew that it was the most popular venue in town. Half the Army and a quarter of the Air Force personnel would be converging there, same as they had. He checked the posters again; the cancan dancers’ alabaster thighs looked somewhat intimidating and yet amusing, like a colorful joke. Worst case, he told himself, it would make for a good story to put in a letter home.

“Come on,” Nix said, patting Dick’s shoulder. “I’ll buy you dinner first.”

By the time they made their way back to the theater they were already late, and a lot of the best tables were gone, taken or reserved. Nix said something in a careless French drawl that sounded a little too condescending even to Dick’s ears, and the man at the entrance didn’t take it too kindly, but he went silent when Nix pulled two shiny franc notes from his wallet, folded them around his thumb, and thrust them nonchalantly into the man’s front pocket. After that, they paid what they owed—that is, Nix did—and they were escorted to an excellent table in the dim light of the ongoing show.

It was not at all like Dick had expected.

A lady singer stood at the front of an enormous stage, wrapped in a black dress which barely showed any cleavage. In the back, an accordion player provided all the music she needed. She was petite, almost tiny, and strangely unassuming in her mournful attire, but the voice was strong and carried far. And what a voice. The song was a kind of waltz, fast-paced and cheerful. The singer’s _contralto_ voice quavered in a hammering tremolo over some difficult French sounds, again and again, and it was invariably cacophonic, almost like a gargle, but also weirdly charming, with a kind of defiant, spirited beauty to it.

Dick groped for the backrest of his chair and sat down without peeling his eyes from the stage.

“Dick?”

“Mm?”

“What do you drink?”

Dick looked up to find the waiter standing by Nix’s side, a vaguely surly expression on his face. “No, I’m all right.”

“You have to order something. House rules.”

Dick frowned. “We paid for tickets, didn’t we?”

Nix smiled. “Nevermind. _Alors, deux verres—non, plutôt une bouteille de—Qu’est-ce que vous avez? Cabernet Sauvignon—?_ ” 

_“Oui, monsieur, mais nous n’avons que des vieux crus de vingt ans.”_

_“Les Allemands ont bu tout le reste?”_

_“Les Boches ne buvaient que de la pisse de chat.”_

Nix guffawed. “Right. What the hell, then. _Apportez-nous cette bouteille. Merci.”_

Dick only barely listened to the exchange. He spoke enough French to find his way around a liberated village, tell beef from fish on a menu, and inform the locals that he didn’t speak French, but anything more elaborated than that was beyond his grasp. Besides, his attention was back on the singer.

The song had hit a lull; the mood had turned dark, almost sour, and the lady was barely singing anymore, more like reciting with a melodic inflection, and something about the way she did it sounded awfully familiar, but Dick couldn’t quite place it. She wasn’t _slurring_ , exactly, but—

Dick turned his head. Nix sat comfortably slumped in his chair facing the stage, one leg crossed over the other, lit cigarette in hand. As he watched the show his mouth was vaguely twisted upwards, a faint remnant of the previous smile.

“What’s the song about?” Dick asked.

“Hm? Let’s see.” Nix took on a focused expression, actively listening. “Her man is not coming back. _Elle est foutue_ , ha,” he smirked for some reason, as the song turned to yet another cheerful waltz section, and the singer started to sound like she was on the verge of tears. “Her man died, she’s sad, she goes to the bar where he used to play. Ah, and she’s a whore.”

Dick suspected that Nix’s crude summary didn’t do the song much justice. “She sounds—Is she supposed to be drunk?”

“I guess.” Nix took a puff from his cigarette and tapped the back of Dick’s leg playfully with the toe of his boot. “You like that?”

“You don’t?”

Nix shrugged casually.

“She’s—,” _good_ was not the word Dick was looking for, “good,” he said anyway, for lack of a better one. “Strange,” he added. As he said that, the song ended abruptly with a verse that was almost a scream, and the singer cowered as if the stage lights had suddenly blinded her. 

The audience erupted in applause, and Dick joined in. Nix also applauded politely.

“Are you going to drink it all?” Dick asked, eyeing the waiter who was coming back with a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

“ _We_ are,” Nix said, gesturing at the waiter to fill Dick’s glass for the tasting.

Dick felt a frown forming, but willed it to disappear. He’d already declined the same offer at dinner, his refusal met with nothing more than a nod, but now, for whatever reason, it seemed to mean something that he said yes. Nix looked expectant; no, happy; happier than he’d seen him in a long while, at any rate. And sure, Nix looked cheerful most days, in that Nixian self-deprecating way, but he hadn’t been _happy_ ; neither of them had been.

“One glass,” Dick bargained, which the waiter took as a sign to start pouring. “But I’d rather not have to carry you home.”

“You’ve seen me do a lot worse,” Nix said nonchalantly, “and make it back on my feet.”

“You’re mixing me up with Harry,” Dick said.

“No, in the beginning, at Benning,” Nix insisted. “You’d come with, sometimes.”

Dick had almost forgotten all about it. After mostly keeping to himself at Camp Croft, he’d thought that the fellow officer candidates at Benning were worth the little extra effort. There were guys like Lewis Nixon, clever men, fine officer material, and if they all liked to go out for a drink from time to time, well, maybe they were onto something. Not the drinking, but the hanging out. The bonding.

“This is better,” Dick deflected, uninterested in bringing up his own shortcomings.

“Sure is,” Nix agreed amiably, and then hinted with a tip of his chin at Dick’s glass, which now contained a spit of red wine. Both he and the waiter seemed to be expecting him to do something with it.

“What?” Dick asked.

“Taste it,” Nix said. “Tell us if it’s good.”

“How would I know?” Dick replied, though he took the glass.

“If it tastes like your grandma’s cheese, we’ll send it back.”

Dick obeyed. The smell was a little too rich, with a strong alcoholic punch, but the wine itself was smooth, although it tickled the sides of Dick’s tongue in a mildly unpleasant way. He couldn’t see himself enjoying any sizable quantity of it, but as near as he could tell, it didn’t taste spoiled.

“I think it’s good,” he said. The waiter filled their glasses and left the bottle.

“You know, it was one of those nights, when we went out with the guys. When I started wondering,” Nix said, as if following a silent train of thought. He left that hanging as he took the glass up to his lips and swallowed a hearty gulp. He smacked his lips appreciatively and put the glass down, and his fingers moved smoothly from the foot of the glass to a spot on the table which was not too far from Dick’s own fingers.

“What about?” Dick asked.

“If you batted for the other team.”

“A sports metaphor? I’m impressed.” Dick’s smile felt a little tense. “What gave me away?”

“ _Excusez-moi, vous avez du feu?”_

They looked up. The Frenchman who’d addressed Nix wore a thick leather jacket, a black beret, and a large armband in the colors of the French _Résistance_ flag. On the white stripe there was General De Gaulle’s black double cross. He held a thin, unlit cigarette between his fingers.

“ _Bien sûr_ ,” Nix answered cordially, handing him his silver lighter.

The man lit the cigarette, checked Nix’s initials engraved on the zippo, then returned it with a thank you. He looked lazy and circumspect, with a confident posture that seemed to be missing a rifle hanging from his neck. The hard lines on his face and the relative modesty of his clothes made him look out of place amidst the red velvet and the lights, but he still held himself like he owned the place. Dick wondered if the heroes of the people had to pay the entrance fee.

The man studied Nix first, then Dick. “ _Parachutistes_?” he asked.

“ _Oui_ ,” Nix said.

“ _Quelle division_?”

Nix told him and the man nodded, then asked something else that Dick didn’t make out.

Nix’s mouth curled in the familiar, near-invisible smirk he employed when the top brass was around. “He asked if we were here when they liberated Paris.”

Dick suppressed a smile. “Well, they entered first.”

“They did, didn’t they. _Non, c’était la quatrième infanterie_ ,” Nix shook his head.

A scattered applause came from the other end of the theater. The singer was walking through the audience, table by table, shaking hands and collecting praise. The Americans’ reaction was somewhat tepid, but the French and British guests were out of their minds with enthusiasm; a few of them stood up as a sign of respect. 

“Who’s she?” Dick asked.

“No clue. Want me to introduce you?”

Dick considered the offer, but before he could answer the gaullist bent his neck in Dick’s direction and explained in a slow French, over-articulating each word: “ _Elle,_ ” he pointed at the lady, “ _est une collabo._ ” And then normally, and loud enough for a good part of the room to hear him clearly: “ _Elle devrait être tondue puis exécutée.”_

The singer turned her head sharply towards the man, and something like a frown crossed her face. Somebody close to her shot a few heated words against the gaullist, but he shouted something back along the lines of “go to hell _”_. The lady touched her supporter’s arm and replied directly to the Résistance man in a tone that was all but apologetic: “ _J’ai fait plus pour la Résistance que toi qui secouais ton fusil comme une bite molle_.”

_“Ah oui? En écartant les cuisses pour les Boches?”_

_“Pendant que tu te pendais à la porte arrière des bordels de la Gestapo dans l’espoir d’obtenir des restes à bon marché.”_

At the last reply, the clique around the singer (and Nix) burst into a raucous laughter, and the lady, livid as she was, turned her back to the gaullist with a regal shrug. 

“She got you there, buddy,” Nix said in English, and the _Résistance_ man stormed off with a sour grimace.

Nix shook his head and pointed a thumb behind his back, at the scene that had just unfolded, and chuckled: “The French,” as if to say, _Aren’t they a riot?_

“What was all that about?” Dick asked.

“Ah, sorry. He said that she’s a Nazi collaborator, and that she should be shot.”

“I think I had that part down.”

“And then...” Nix took a puff off his cigarette, considering how to translate the rest. He scratched the sides of his mouth. “Hm. There was a funny little bit on who was or wasn’t sleeping with the Germans. And the German’s whores. All very tasteful.”

“That’s a serious accusation to throw at someone,” Dick observed, sour at having been moved by the performance of such a shady character, but at the same time unwilling to take the man's words at face value.

Nix shrugged. “Who _hasn’t_ slept with the Germans in this country, is a better question.”

“A lot of people, I’m sure,” Dick replied.

Nix looked like he was going for a humorous retort, but at the very last second he thought better of it.

“Come on, Dick, cheer up,” he said instead, refilling his own glass. He handed Dick’s his, which had been sitting there untouched ever since the waiter filled it. “You haven’t had a drop. Don’t think that I haven’t noticed. And we haven’t gotten to the good part yet. Cheers.”

Dick clinked his glass half-heartedly and took a diligent sip.

Something told him it was going to be a long night.

  
  


**_30 December 1944, Bois Jacques_ **

Peacock was touring the States. Nix had personally put him on the jeep that would drive him to newly liberated Bastogne; from there he’d be off to Mourmelon, Paris, England, and eventually home. He’d shaken the man’s hand and bid him good luck, and never for a minute did he regret it.

Dick seemed at the very least ambivalent about it. Initially he’d accepted the fact as a matter of course: surely Nix wasn’t going to take off now; surely Nix wasn’t going to leave when he was needed the most. Even if he’d been interested, it was glaringly obvious to Nix that anything short of refusing the ticket would have destroyed any regard Dick had for him.

But that was before the barrage had intensified and the casualties had spiked up, a string of fatal accidents with no end in sight. Now Nix caught Dick looking at him from time to time, a pensive expression on his face like something was amiss, and he’d taken to reminding Nix that he should go back to Regiment for a reason or other, trying to keep it specific so that Nix wouldn’t think he was just trying to get Nix off the line—which he absolutely was.

“Wonder if it’s snowing back home,” Dick murmured, sticking a hand out of the tarp cover of the foxhole. He returned it with a scattered collection of snowflakes sitting on the palm of his glove.

“Maybe,” Nix answered. He’d liked snow back home, the postcard-like, scenographic backdrop you could watch through a window, harmless and transient. He felt it’d be a while before he could like it again.

He patted Dick’s knee and then leaned on it to push himself up, a groan escaping his lips at the effort. He’d been sitting for too long; his joints were stuck, and his feet tingled with pins and needles. “Christ, I’m old,” he muttered, taking a few steps on the spot to wake up his numb limbs. “Honey, remind me to buy a walking stick next time we drive into town,” he joked, but Dick barely smiled. His face looked tight.

“You could sit this one out,” Dick said. “There’s a storm—”

“Not for another couple hours,” Nix reminded him.

“What if it starts early,” Dick objected.

“I’ll find myself a hole and wait it out.”

“Timing’s awful.”

“As good as it can be. Better than sending the boys out on sloppy intel.”

“So send someone. Heck, send the S2. It’s his job.”

Nix leaned over, straightened Dick’s helmet, and fastened the chin strap that Dick had left undone. Next, he pulled the blanket up to Dick’s face and tucked it on all sides with humorous motherly care. “Now you play that one out in your head again, only you’re me and I’m you.”

Dick sighed despondently.

“Nice talking. Look, I’ll be back in—Well, in a while. Don’t wait up.”

As willing as Nix was to take risks, he wasn’t reckless, so he didn’t go alone. The first half hour was peaceful, boring almost: he and the two men he’d handpicked cut through the Airborne positions in complete quiet, the snow crunching under their boots the loudest sound for miles. The closer they got to the line, the more alive the woods felt; soldiers on duty sat on the lip of their foxholes smoking, chatting, shivering with their hands stuck in their pits. They passed the spot where John Julian had been taken down, the puddle of blood trapped under a layer of frozen snow like fruit jelly. They passed a shallow foxhole where Compton sat alone, looking far into the distance; Nix lifted a hand in greeting, but Buck didn’t respond.

They slowed down when they approached the outskirts of Foy. Once they reached the outermost layer of the line, Nix ordered noise discipline, and they proceeded more cautiously from there on. What made this recon dangerous was the same reason why the advance itself worried Nix: from the edge of the woods to the German positions there was a large stretch of open field with only a few scattered buildings and very little cover. Aerial recon had spotted one tank so far and given them a fairly good idea of the enemy’s headcount, but Nix wouldn’t recommend green-lighting any attack with no solid intel on armor and artillery.

He suspected that the Krauts hid an 88 piece somewhere behind the church, but the aerial photographs didn’t show it clearly. He split their small group in two, sending one man to the opposite side of the barbed wire fence. The fresh snow made everything brighter around them, but the dark clouds hid them despite their sad lack of winter camo gear. Scampering from wall to wall, from a hut to a table to a storage shed, they made their way towards the German positions. Nix took no chances, taking long enough breaks between every little advance and the next, so that if a sentinel had spotted a movement, they’d probably think they’d imagined it by the time they were moving again. No one shouted, no one shot.

Nix and his man got to the edge of the church on one side; on the other end, the third member of their party slid past a frozen haystack and Nix briefly lost sight of him.

Covered by the side of the building, Nix took out his binoculars and took a swipe of the center of the village. There was very little activity; three Germans stood in the central square around a burning oil drum, and some on-and-off glinting at the windows suggested the presence of more men inside the buildings. Nix had studied the photographs hard enough to have a fairly good idea of where to look... 

_Ah_ , he thought with a jolt of excitement, _there we go_. He almost let out a triumphant sound when he spotted the gun of a camouflaged Tiger peeking from behind a corner; increasing the magnifying power of his binoculars he was able to spot a second one a few meters behind. A lump covered in snow even further back was in all likelihood a third tank.

He debated internally whether they should risk it and get any closer, but he didn’t dare. Then his binoculars picked up the second of his men on the far end of the square, hiding behind a stack of crates, and he decided that between the three of them they had enough visual range that they must have seen all they could, for now. He gestured to retreat, and they slid back the same way they’d come, slowly and cautiously, until they were back on their side of the barbed wire fence. They made a dash for the woods and didn’t stop running until they were well into the Allied line.

Nix was sweating in his coat, excitement making his heart pump fast. He lit himself a cigarette, passed the pack around, and smoked contentedly as they made their way back. No good news, of course, but better than sending their men blindly against the unknown. He’d have to triple-check the photographs and hope that once the snow cleared, they could get some fresh ones. 

The storm picked up very quickly and caught up to them as they passed the second line of foxholes. As the wind howled and the snow started pouring on their heads, he ordered the men to take cover and wait. Easy CP wasn’t too far, but they could barely see past their feet at this point; he could barely make out the silhouettes of his men as he soldiered through the wave of snow wetly slapping his face. He advanced, looking around for a tree fat enough to provide even minimal cover, and as he did so he stumbled and fell straight down into a hole in the ground.

“For fuck’s sake, man,” someone exclaimed, from a spot not quite under him but somewhere to his right.

“Sorry,” Nix grumbled, collecting his limbs to his side of the foxhole. It was a rather shallow one, with a cover made of a thick pine foliage, and he’d fallen right through the branches and flat on his ass in a storm of pine needles. Feeling the snow rain mercilessly on both him and the owner of the foxhole, Nix extricated himself and clumsily pushed the cover back where it belonged, above their heads, perched from side to side of the foxhole. It wasn’t a good cover, really, as the snow kept seeping through the gaps and pooling on his shoulders, but it was better than nothing.

He’d lost his cigarette in the fall. Annoyed with the weather and with the war and with himself, unsure for how long he was going to be stuck there, and bothered by the thought that Dick would be wondering, Nix rummaged through his pockets for the cigarette pack and realized that he’d never gotten it back. He huffed in frustration.

“Hey. Compton, is it?”

“Nixon,” Compton greeted back, emotionlessly.

“You got a smoke? I lost—”

“I don’t smoke,” Buck said.

Of course he didn’t, now Nix remembered: one out of a long list of things he had in common with Dick. There had been a time, early during their England training, when he’d bothered himself by noticing, no, keeping track of things like this. Just as Nix had drawn a breath of relief that they’d gotten rid of Wally Moore, off to play traffic warden with the pathfinders, this jock had come sniffing around for a best buddy, all broad smiles and broad shoulders and an athletic record longer than the Lancaster census. Nix had been meanly pleased when Dick hadn’t fallen for it.

Compton let out a sigh, distracting Nix from his thoughts. There was something wrong with him these days; some deep, dark malady had taken him, turning him into a shadow of his overconfident self.

“Hell of a night,” Nix muttered, to which Buck replied with a noncommittal hum. Nix thought of how long he was going to spend stuck in that foxhole and impatience almost made him groan. He tucked his coat tighter around his body to keep the warmth in and closed his eyes, resigning himself to a long wait. He was not tired, definitely not sleepy, but perhaps he’d manage to catch an hour of shut-eye anyway, and by the time he woke up the storm would have passed.

He listened to the wind howling over his head until the patterns of sound became familiar, predictable and regular enough that he would probably be able to sleep through the noise.

“Heard you won yourself a ticket home,” Compton said out of the blue, voice rumbling in a slow, almost slurred tone. “And gave it away.”

Nix hadn’t advertised it. He’d told Harry at the aid station, to cheer him up by making himself the target of some good-humored ribbing, and Sink and the regimental staff knew, of course. Then again, there was no way of keeping anything secret to a bunch of men stuck in a forest with nothing better to do than talk.

“You ever crossed the Atlantic in January? Fucking nightmare,” he replied breezily.

Compton was silent for a long moment, long enough that Nix went back to trying to catch some sleep. Then: “Nixon,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

Nix opened his eyes. “What?”

“What are you doing here?” Compton repeated, in the same deadpan tone.

“What, like _right_ here?” Nix asked back, willfully misunderstanding the question. “’Cause there’s a storm out there, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Like,” Compton replied, even more slowly, “not in New Jersey, smoking cigars and petting your dog and—Whatever you folks do to pass the time. Going to cocktail parties.”

Nix let out a raspy chuckle. “Dead on, Bucky. That’s my life. An endless string of cocktail parties, broken by the occasional dog petting.”

Compton threw him a long glance that almost gave Nix shivers. Something was wrong with the man, that much was certain. The last time Nix had seen a stare like that was back at basic camp, some fat kid who’d volunteered in hopes that the Army would make a man out of him. Sergeant Shitface, as they’d dubbed him, had loved taking it out on the weak ones, and when he was through with the sad sacks, they’d look like Compton did now.

“I was drafted,” Nix answered. “I took my letter, went to the office, got my assignment.”

“Not all draftees made it.”

“I’ve got the heart of a bull. Never used it.”

Compton scoffed. “Dick I understand,” he continued. “Guys like Webster, they’ve read one too many war poems. You?” He paused. “You could’ve made it go away.”

“So what you’re saying is, a guy can’t have a few millions to his name and love his country.”

“Is that why?”

Nix shrugged. He’d never outright lied about this, but he’d never answered truthfully either. If he circled around the question smoothly enough, people would fill in the gaps the way they liked best, which was invariably kinder than the truth.

_How did you end up here, Nix?_

_Honestly? I missed Europe. I once knew a girl who worked in a brasserie in Paris…_

_Honestly? I wanted to shed a few pounds. Married life makes you pudgy..._

_Honestly? I..._

“Honestly? I thought it’d piss Father off.”

There was a second of heavy silence, then Compton broke into a disbelieving laugh. “Fuck off.”

“It’s a true story,” Nix smirked.

“Nah. I don’t believe it. Not even you would—”

“What’s that mean, not _even_ me?” Nix rebutted, amiably enough, but Compton’s awkward silence right after told him that that part had not been a joke.

“And why are _you_ here?” Nix replied, feeling a little less inclined towards camaraderie. “You couldn’t make it in the big boys league and thought inter-regimental games were more your speed?”

“Says the man who can’t touch his toes,” Compton delivered smoothly, then shook his head. “Why do you think? I wanted to make ’em proud,” he said.

Nix took a hard look inside himself and found nothing charitable to say to match that simple, honest statement. “I’m sure the head cheerleader is shaking her pom poms for you.”

“Ha,” Buck said softly. He rubbed his gloved hands to warm them up. “Well. Not anymore,” he added, voice dropping down almost to a whisper. 

Nix closed his mouth, utterly disconcerted at the idea that Buck Compton, of all men, might be choosing him as the recipient of whatever mawkish spillage had chosen this moment of all moments to overflow from his heart.

“Huh,” he grunted, taken aback. “ _Dear John_? Or—”

He thought of Harry again, of Kitty’s letters sitting at the bottom of a sack somewhere. Nix had found him in high spirits because the mail deliveries had resumed and lo and behold, four letters bearing Kitty’s perfect handwriting had fallen in his—still reasonably virile—lap.

Sometimes they weren’t brave enough to call it done, Nix thought. Sometimes they just stopped writing, letting whatever warmth was there dissipate, like stars moving apart from each other, until revolution after revolution all that remained was a cold, dead, lifeless stretch of space.

“Something like that,” Buck said.

Nix sniffed. “Happens to the best of us. An asshole like you, you probably had it coming.”

Compton gave into a pained chuckle. “Geez, Nixon. You sure know how to kick a man when he’s down.”

Nix threw a glance his way. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said defensively, but Buck shook his head and said nothing.

Nix heaved a sigh. He put his hand inside his coat, fishing out a crumpled envelope, one of the short sides roughly torn open by the censorship. He handed it over, and when Compton didn’t take it, he pushed it a little closer.

Compton turned the envelope around in his hands, but didn’t pull the letter out. “What is it?”

“As I said. It happens to the best of us.”

“Ah.” Compton handed it back, looking a little more sympathetic. “Sorry about that.” He produced a tiny, frozen grin. “Then again, an asshole like you.”

“Right?” Nix smiled self-deprecatingly. He looked at the envelope, thrust his hands tight inside his armpits, and admitted: “I haven’t read it.”

“What, for real?”

“It’s not like I don’t know what’s in there.” Nix shrugged, recoiling a little from Compton’s surprise. It was weird that he hadn’t bothered opening a letter from his wife, he knew as much. Then again, the last letter he’d received from Kathy had casually informed him that she was fucking someone else, so perhaps he was being entirely reasonable here. “I’ll just throw it away,” he added.

“That’s—” Compton stopped halfway through the sentence. “Well. I guess you’ll find out.”

“Yeah,” Nix muttered, putting the envelope away, against his heart, where it had been sleeping for the past week. A foolish part of him had hoped that Compton would just open it, and then someone who was not him would have _known_ , and then…

Nix looked up through the branches covering the foxhole. It was still snowing, but not as violently, and the wind seemed to have calmed down somewhat. He moved the cover carefully aside, making a bunch of snow rain on his helmet and on his chest. He got his feet under himself and crouched up on his heels.

“I’ll try my luck,” Nix said, by way of a goodbye. Compton’s impossibly blond hair caught a glimpse of moonlight that made him look just like a ghost for a moment; a shadow with colorless skin.

“You take care, huh?” Nix muttered. “Take a walk, get some sun. You look like shit.”

“Fuck you, Nixon,” Compton grinned, and when Nix climbed out of the foxhole, he shoved Nix in a way that, to the casual observer, could have almost looked like he was helping him up.

Nix patted himself for his cigarettes before remembering, once again, that he was out. As he did that, the envelope rustled softly in his breast pocket. Nix pulled it out again and stared at his name and rank until his vision blurred.

 _Until the end of the war_ , he thought.

He buried the letter in the snow and resumed walking.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhu-0IBZm5s) is the version of _L'Accordéoniste_ I used as inspiration for the scene. This video is from 1954, but the song is actually from 1940 and was one of Piaf's most popular songs at the time when the story is set.


	3. Chapter 3

**_Paris (IV)_ **

By the time they were out of the theater, Nix wasn’t drunk, and neither was Dick, but Dick doubted that either of them would have shined in a field maneuver or even at basic PT. Nix was overly cheerful; Dick instead felt a gloominess at the back of his mind that he just couldn’t quash.

“Come on, Dick,” Nix said, too loud, when he saw Dick’s tight face. “You just can’t let yourself have fun, can you?”

Dick thought that he had given ample proof to the contrary earlier that day; that he—that _they_ , damn it—had had a decent amount of fun and Dick had been quite instrumental to it happening, but he knew that mentioning it would just prolong a discussion he didn’t want to have. Besides, that was not the kind of fun Nix was talking about; not the kind that mattered here.

“I had fun,” he said instead. “It was all right.”

“ _It was all right_ ,” Nix repeated mockingly around his cigarette, sheltering the flame of the lighter from the wind. “What was wrong with it? Was it the legs? Too much skin? I thought you’d like it, even if—Ah, damn it.” He shook the almost empty lighter to hack up some fluid. “Mm. There,” he took a puff, “Look, even if you don’t swing that way—”

“The legs were all right,” Dick said, cutting him short. “The show was fine. There was nothing wrong with it.”

It wasn’t the show, he thought but didn’t say. Nix always seemed to think of Dick as some kind of prude. Perhaps cabaret wouldn’t become his new passion, but he could withstand a saucy show and come out the other way unscathed; and sure, the legs and the splits and the flashes of breasts didn’t do much for him, but he wasn’t going to clutch his pearls and burst into flames at the sight of a nipple.

It was just that—But how to explain it? It was more like, when they were alone anywhere else, on the line or back at HQ or even on leave, he’d feel completely and utterly at home with Nix. They would talk of anything or nothing at all, and even not seeing eye to eye on something would be sort of nice. Arguing with a sober Nix was a good way to pass the time. But here in a dark theater, with hundreds of other people enjoying themselves, and Nix getting slowly but inexorably wasted... He could see where this was leading, and it dried the words right in his mouth. He didn’t enjoy being with Nix on these terms.

“I know,” Nix replied, ostensibly having listened to none of Dick’s words. “We need to try something more up your alley.”

“I think I’ll go back to the hotel,” Dick said, checking his watch. Midnight. God, was it still that early? “You go on.”

“No, no, no,” Nix put his hand on Dick’s arm. “Come on. I know just the place. Short walk.” He grinned. “Can you walk after two glasses of wine or do I need to carry you?”

“I think you’d have more fun without me,” Dick opposed. “I mean it. I don’t mind—”

“Not where I’m taking you. Come on, listen to a friend,” Nix insisted, starting to sound a little petulant, and leaned in, breath smelling like wine and smoke. “Do I need to call Poland?”

Dick pulled back a little, stiffening up. “That’s not the way it works,” he frowned.

“Isn’t it?”

“It’s not a switch,” Dick objected. “That’ll make me want to do things. It’s—”

A commitment. A vow.

“I know,” Nix said softly, and just for a second there Dick thought that he’d been wrong, that Nix was totally sober, but the grin he showed just a moment later was a little too cheerful, with a little too many teeth, and Dick wasn’t sure anymore. “Let’s go.”

So they went. Nix had a rough idea of where he was headed, but he either couldn’t remember or the wine was making it hard for him to orient himself. The neighborhood of Pigalle, chaotic now as it had been when they’d gotten off the train, seemed designed to confuse foreigners and locals alike with its messy daedalus of big and small alleys crossing without a clear plan, without a comforting geometric grid underneath. At some point, Dick suggested that they ask for directions, but Nix chuckled around his smoke and continued as if Dick had said nothing.

“Must be that one,” Nix finally muttered. It was the third time they passed a tiny staircase which led to a door half hidden below the street level. At sidewalk level, two windows cast no light at all, either because it was all dark inside or because the light was blocked by thick curtains.

“That doesn’t look like a club,” Dick observed. It didn’t look like anything, really, except maybe someone’s house.

“That’s ’cause you’ve never been to—There, see the flowers?” Nix announced triumphantly, pointing at the bouquet of wilting pansies tied to the iron knocker.

Dick followed sheepishly as Nix left the flowers where they were and rapped at the door with his knuckles instead. He looked nervous, excited, short of breath. A bead of sweat shone on his temple despite the cold.

“When I was at Fort Ord, they’d send us to places like this,” Nix explained. “To take the lost sheep home.”

Dick made to say something, but then the door was unlatched and left open a fraction, as if whoever had opened it couldn’t bother staying to welcome the guests. Nix pushed it open the rest of the way and entered, with Dick at his tail.

It was a club, with a counter and a barman and a few scattered tables. The clientele was sparse and mostly local, though Dick’s eye immediately fell on two British RAF types sitting at a corner table, their heads close. On the other side of the small room, when he turned his head, Dick saw a US Navy sailor in his standard blues, drinking alone, and not far from him, two WACs chatting softly at another table. The sailor looked up to check the newcomers, didn’t seem to find them of interest, and went back to his drink.

“Sit down,” Nix said, looking like he’d sobered up on the spot. “I’ll grab drinks.”

“I don’t—”

“I’ll get you a tonic water or something. Sit down,” Nix repeated, ushering him in the right direction.

The tables had been placed so to leave a little empty space in the middle—a tiny dance floor, Dick realized, though nobody was using it. And indeed the music wasn’t really good for it, a somber jazz-y tune that inspired sleep rather than romance. He sat down at a side table and looked around some more, discreetly, but none of the other tables was going to produce a dancing couple: it was either men alone, or men sitting together in twos or threes—and the WACs, of course.

All in all, it looked like a slow night.

Dick pursed his lips thoughtfully. This place was, indeed, much more up his alley. It was quiet and private and the music was low enough that you could have a conversation; it didn’t seem like a place for dramatic exposés or flinging insults across the room.

Perhaps Nix had been right: perhaps Dick should listen to a friend sometimes.

“ _He smiles_ ,” Nix announced coming back with the glasses, eyes turned up to the sky like he was witnessing a real-life miracle. “You like it here?”

Dick nodded. “Looks all right. How do you know it?”

“Asked around,” Nix answered vaguely. “Beats me, but certain types prefer a quiet little hole.” He smiled softly, charmingly.

Dick returned the smile. A clear soda bubbled in his glass; there was scotch in Nix’s, but that was a matter of course. His earlier irritation felt childish now.

“I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, earlier,” he said. “I did like it at the theater. I just—” He looked around. “I like this better,” he admitted.

“I’d say,” Nix smirked.

Behind Nix’s back, someone knocked at the door. The barman walked over, checked the peephole, then unlatched the door and went back to his post. The guest, a civilian, cast a look about himself and then went to sit at the bar; the bartender greeted him like he was a regular, and they exchanged a few words in French.

At the other end of the room, the sailor stood up and crossed the dance floor to go sit next to the newcomer.

Perhaps Dick was too used to military life and its nonexistent privacy, because he caught himself staring and made himself look away. He’d seen enough, though. There was no mistaking the sailor’s intention, the brazen overture he’d pulled on the Frenchman, nor the long look the other man had given him before confirming that yes, sure he could sit there.

Following his gaze, Nix turned a full hundred-and-eighty degrees to check out the scene. Dick pinched Nix’s arm through the sleeve of his coat.

“Don’t,” he said softly.

Nix turned back to face him with a smirk. “Why not?”

“It’s not—” Dick stopped halfway through the sentence, suddenly unsure what Nix’s smirk was for. What was so amusing, anyway? A bar hookup; Dick had to believe that it happened all the time. He’d meant to say “It’s not polite,” but then another question hit him like a slap across the face: did Nix find it amusing or _laughable_?

Nix frowned slightly, though the smirk hung on. “What, so you can look and I can’t?” he teased, though mercifully in a low voice. “Strikes me as unfair.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dick replied, thrown off-balance by the joke, which was exactly why Nix had said it.

“Then I have no clue what you mean,” Nix replied tersely, taking the glass up to his mouth. The smile had cracked; he sounded a little tense now.

“I meant it’s not funny.” He paused, taking in Nix’s confused expression. Was the booze making him slow? “And you need to be more—discreet,” Dick finished.

Nix moved the glass away from his mouth, hand hanging mid-air close to his chest.

“Discreet,” he repeated, flatly.

Dick nodded. “We’re not alone,” he said, throwing a glance to the side, to the other tables.

Nix leaned back on his chair, the wood creaking softly under the weight, and swung an arm around the top of the backrest. He licked his lips the way he did when something really, really to his liking was headed his way.

“Dick, you know I think the world of you,” he started, and even though Dick could tell that the segue would be a bucketful of merciless teasing, he couldn’t help but feel warmth flare in his chest at that open admission. “But I’m starting to think that you got us all fooled. Maybe Sergeant Shitface was right. Country boys _are_ a little slow.”

“I don’t understand,” Dick admitted, even as he hated proving Nix right.

Nix leaned in conspiratorially. “Look around, Captain. That’s why I took you here.”

As if on cue, the old player sitting behind the bar counter reached the end of the vinyl with a screech. The bartender turned around to change it, and before he could choose a new disc the American sailor addressed him in a mix of English and broken French: “Hey, put on something else— _Quelque chose—Quelque chose à danser_!”

The next piece was, indeed, more the dancing kind, a soulful slow type of song. The American sailor leaned towards his new friend to ask a question, though too softly for Dick to catch, and a little bargaining took place in hushed voices. Once they were over, the sailor stood, extended his hand in a sort of gentlemanly offer, and the Frenchman took it and followed him to the tiny dance floor. Dick looked, this time unable to stop staring, and swallowed thickly.

Nix kicked his shin softly under the table. “Hey,” he said, grinning openly behind his scotch. “It’s not funny, Dick.”

“No,” Dick agreed, forcing himself to move his gaze back to Nix’s face. The shadows cast by the dim lights made him look mysterious, dangerous maybe, unpredictable surely. Then again, Nix had never been a predictable man, surprising Dick every step of the way with sharp left turns, and whenever Dick thought he had him pinned down, familiar, charted territory, he had to think again.

“Now,” Nix tutted, licking his lips. The tip of his boot climbed the inside of his shin, teasing the inner bend of Dick’s knee. “Don’t go Quaker on me.”

“I’m not,” Dick replied. “I—didn’t expect this, is all.”

“Queer bars not your thing?” Nix replied.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Dick replied, perhaps a little more dryly than he’d intended.

Nix looked about himself, nursing the glass in his hand.

“So,” he said, resuming a discussion they’d dropped hours before, “that time, at OCS. When we all went drinking together. Who was there—? Wilson, I think. Miller. And someone else. You remember that time?”

“Yes,” Dick said. “Taylor.”

“Oh yeah. Taylor. Christ, I’d forgotten all about that piece of shit. Didn’t they give him the boot?”

“A week later,” Dick confirmed, because he knew exactly which outing Nix was talking about. He didn’t have Nix’s crazy memory for details, but he was good with names and faces. “He almost put me off coming altogether.”

“Why did you, by the way?”

Dick shrugged. “I was,” _lonely_ , “bored. Thought I’d give it a try.”

The expression on Nix’s face softened just for a second, before defaulting back to his sardonic smile.

“So here we all are at this shithole in Columbus, and at some point I realize that I haven’t heard you speak a single word. Not a peep all night. Which strikes me as funny, because on the field Corporal Winters’s got a whole damn lot of things to say.” He put down the glass and ran the tip of his forefinger along the rim, where his lips had been, to catch a drop of scotch which was trying to run off down the side. “And I mean a _whole_ lot.”

“Communication on the field is an essential—,” Dick started, deciding that if Nix wanted to rehash the old play where Nix was the careless socialite and Dick his stuck-up, rule-loving friend, sure, they could play that. He knew his character’s lines by heart.

“So I start paying attention,” Nix interrupted him. “And sure, you’re bored as hell. No surprise there. I knew you’d hate it. You’re pissed, and you’re doing this thing where you look at your watch under the table,” he mimed the gesture, “every ten minutes or so. And the conversation is what it is, I mean we’re all halfway wasted at that point, and Taylor—yeah, you’re right, it was Taylor—Taylor’s the worst off, he’s half a glass from shitting his pants, is how wasted he is. But then I notice something else.” He paused, entirely for suspense, it seemed. “Any idea what that is?”

“That I ordered a soda?” Dick suggested, ironically.

“That you’ve been looking.”

Dick paused. “What?”

“I notice,” Nix repeated, slowly, regally, like he was revealing a secret he’d been keeping for years, “that you’ve been looking. At me. All night.”

As preposterous as that was, Dick felt caught. An icy shiver ran down his back and through his legs and left him almost shaking. For a split second his treacherous brain forgot where he was and what they were: it was the spring of ’42 again, Nix was a half-stranger whom Dick admired and desired from afar, and all of Dick’s years of care and caution and restraint had been for nothing, because he’d made one fatal blunder, and now his career, his reputation, his life were over, over, over.

“I didn’t,” Dick said when the last icy tendril crawled out of his body.

“You did,” Nix replied. “Discreetly. Like the watch. When you thought no one would notice.”

Dick scoffed, shook his head. “I really don’t think—”

“And so I tell myself, what’s so interesting that Corporal Winters would stare at me all night? Do I got something on my face? Did I say something funny?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and dropped his voice a little. “Not Winters, I tell myself. Never Winters.” He leaned back. “It’s always the quiet ones,” he finished sagely.

Dick stared back into Nix’s eyes, which were lit with the casual mischievousness that alcohol wrung out of him, looked at that smug mouth, at Nix’s brazen, overconfident slouching on the chair, and decided that the man was in desperate need of a lesson.

He planted his palms on the table and pushed himself up on his feet. He walked around the table and offered Nix his right hand with the palm turned upwards.

Nix looked at Dick’s hand like he’d never seen one before, and his mouth curved downwards in an interrogative pout.

“What?”

“On your feet,” Dick said curtly.

Nix frowned. “You said you liked it here.”

“On your feet,” Dick repeated, and maybe it was the dry platoon leader’s voice that did the trick, a pavlovian reflex, because this time Nix did comply.

Dick’s hand still hovered between them, untouched. Dick tipped his head towards the dance floor and waited, secretly enjoying the way Nix’s confusion transferred into hesitation, into understanding, into something not far from _fear_ , and when the knowledge finally sunk in and Nix broke into an incredulous chuckle and a silent “no” started to blossom on his lips, Dick thrust his hand a little closer to Nix’s chest and said: “ _Poland_.”

He’d got him there, fair and square, and Nix’s frustrated expression said he knew it.

“How does that even—,” Nix scoffed, unable to finish the sentence. “Who leads?”

“I’ll lead,” Dick said.

“I can’t follow,” Nix objected.

“You’ll learn,” Dick said.

He could see that all of Nix rebelled against the idea, but Dick had already made up his mind, and so he stood there like a pillar of salt until Nix muttered something under his breath and finally took his hand.

Dick was by no means a dancer, but the song didn’t require any prowess besides the ability to lock hands and stand, and anyway, dancing was beyond the point.

Nix’s face was flushed and sulky as Dick arranged Nix’s hand on his own shoulder and wrapped his own fingers around Nix’s side. Nix looked around and then stood rigidly in Dick’s arms, a picture of discomfort. Dick took a half step forward and impressed the gentlest swaying motion to their bodies.

Nix’s nonchalance, his suavity, his whole we’re-in-a-queer-club-so-what attitude had crumbled, and a petty little part of Dick enjoyed seeing him stripped of his facade, exposed and truthful for once.

“There’s no pleasing you, huh?” Nix mumbled contrarily, shuffling his feet off-key with Dick’s.

“This is pleasing me,” Dick replied.

Nix scoffed.

“You made your own bed, Lew,” Dick reminded him, aiming at humor, but Nix’s brow furrowed even more.

Now Dick had to admit that he hadn’t thought further than this point; he’d acted on impulse, on a sense of irritation at Nix’s grand gestures and patronizing attitude, but he’d irrationally hoped that once Dick had him in his arms, Nix would laugh it off and take it in stride like he did the many wretched things that life threw at them.

“This,” Nix muttered, hinting at the position of their hands. “What is this? I’m the girl now?”

Dick frowned, looking at Nix’s dark and hooded eyes. “Someone’s got to be,” he said stiffly.

Nix muttered something under his breath, something Dick didn’t quite catch.

“I thought we’d established that,” Nix repeated, morosely.

All the childish triumph Dick had felt at making Nix capitulate was replaced by a tiny, rapidly growing flame of anger. “That what you think it was?”

“You asked for it,” Nix replied, tipping his chin up in defiance. “You wanted it. I just—”

“ _Followed_?” Dick interrupted, viciously.

Nix looked almost angry now. “I took you to fucking Paris.”

“And I came,” Dick replied coldly. “So we’re even.”

He dropped Nix’s hand and walked back to their table, leaving Nix alone on the dance floor: a dark, bitter shadow at the corner of his eye.

“Why the fuck are you angry now?” Nix almost shouted in the middle of the bar, opening his arms in frustration. A few heads turned at the scene.

Dick’s mouth was dry. He grabbed what was left of his lukewarm soda and downed it in one go, bubbles fizzing painfully at the back of his mouth and down his throat. Nix’s glass was already empty.

_Because you ruined it,_ Dick thought but couldn’t force himself to say. _One perfect memory, and you had to go and ruin it._

“What the hell,” Nix muttered when Dick pulled a stack of folded franc bills from his inner pocket and threw a few onto the table. He didn’t bother counting them.

Outside, the wind had picked up. Dick turned his collar up and lingered for at least a minute in front of the door before he shook his head, feeling stupid, and headed off towards the nearest métro station.

He didn’t manage to make it back to Blanche, but after a few fruitless turns he followed a sign and ended up in front of another station, so he walked down the stairs and gave the wall map a cursory read before choosing a direction.

He was tense, distracted. A boy sitting a few rows behind him looked like he might be a prostitute, which made Dick sad, but worse than that, he reminded Dick of a German soldier he’d gunned down at the Island.

He stopped paying attention. How dared he, he thought. How dared he spoil the one good memory he’d meant to take home with him; the one he’d already silver-framed in his mind, a keepsake for when it was all over, when Nix left him and went back to New Jersey to his wife and Dick would—He would—

Better the bad memories, then. He unconsciously turned around to check if the boy was still there (he was). Better the battle and the blood and the screams and the singing of the rifles. Nothing to spoil there that wasn’t already spoiled.

Nevermind missing his stop; he’d gotten on the wrong train. Dick climbed out of a station called Porte des Lilas and when he checked his pocket map, he found himself over five miles away from his hotel. He was ushered out and the gate closed behind him; no more trains for the night.

When he finally made it back to the hotel, his room key wasn’t hanging on its hook behind the concierge’s back, so he didn’t bother asking for it and instead headed straight upstairs. It must have been close to four in the morning; he’d stopped checking his watch halfway through. Even without conjuring up the memory of D-Day, he’d gone through longer field exercises, but none had left him feeling like he’d been emptied and left a wandering husk.

The door was locked from the inside, so he had to knock. Nix came to open it just a few seconds later, like he’d been camping behind it.

He too looked tired. The half moons under his eyes were swollen, and in the dim light of the bedside lamp, they made him look older. He’d taken off his shirt and his boots and pulled down his suspenders, which hung floppily around his thighs.

Nix opened his mouth and closed it again without letting out a sound. Eyes downcast, he slid to the side to let Dick in and shuffled over to the table to pour himself a glass from a bottle of local liquor sitting next to the hat box.

The bed had been done, probably by the hotel staff, and Dick felt a sudden flood of shame at the thought of the cleaning ladies seeing the mess they'd left. One pillow had been pulled out of its perfect fold and Nix must have lied down on top of the coverlet for a while, as denounced by the creases and dips on his side of the bed. On the nightstand on that side sat an ashtray, full to the brim with cigarette butts. The room was immersed in a thin grey mist.

Dick sat on the foot of the bed, took off his cover, and ran his fingers through his hair, messing it up. He rested his elbows on his knees, hunching over.

Nix didn’t say a word, his presence in the dark half of the room denounced only by his heavy breathing.

Dick was exhausted, but he couldn’t imagine falling asleep in that deafening silence, so he decided he might as well try and get it out of the way.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Hm.” Nix downed the glass and put it down on the table with a solid thud. He looked back at Dick with a long frown and Dick could have sworn that, even through the haziness and the fog of what was going to be a bad hangover, Nix was gathering his strength for something difficult. Something like telling his friend that Poland was a fine country and all, but upon further thought, he’d rather vacation elsewhere.

“You wanted to dance,” Nix said, voice rough with drink and disuse.

Dick shook his head. “I just wanted to—” _Get one up on you. See if you would do it._ “It was wrong of me,” Dick finished.

Nix extended his hand, and waited.

“What?” Dick breathed.

“You can lead,” Nix grumbled. “Even if you’re damn lousy at it.”

Dick rubbed his face with a cold hand. “Lew, I said I’m sorry,” he sighed. “Don’t make fun, please.”

“Who’s making fun? You _are_ lousy.” Nix urged him. “Last chance. C’mere.”

Dick got tentatively on his feet, smoothing the creases off his jacket; Nix took a step forward, and they both trudged on and met awkwardly in the middle. Nix’s flank was warm under Dick’s fingers. His cheek was hot and rough with stubble against Dick’s, and he smelled like sweat and tobacco and all the shit he’d drank.

“There’s no music,” Dick murmured.

“For fuck’s sake,” Nix rolled his eyes.

“No, I just—”

“Become a faggot, they said. Buddies are low-maintenance, they said,” Nix grumbled.

“Who said that?”

“Shush. Let me—How did it go? Hang on.” Nix hummed a tentative tune under his breath, then weaved in the lyrics, filling the gaps with mumblings: “ _Quand y reviendra de la guerre…_ lalala _une maison… Elle sera la_ something _… Et lui sera le patron…_ ”

They weren’t even swaying; they were practically still, barely brushing back and forth against each other. Dick’s throat was tight with something he didn’t have a name for but he knew he’d felt before: a painful, preemptive nostalgia for a thing that wasn’t yet past.

“ _Elle écoute la java…_ lalalala _tout bas… Elle revoit son accordéoniste…_ ”

“You were right about something,” Dick said, peeling his cheek from Nix’s, and Nix stopped singing. “What we did today. I’ve wanted it for a long time. I’m not ashamed.” He hesitated, thinking of his perfect, silver-framed memory now tainted with regret, and the ghost of his previous anger almost made him quiver. “That doesn’t make me your girl.”

Nix pulled his head back a little. He moved his hand from Dick’s shoulder to wrap it around the back of his neck and looked at him for a moment, eyes liquid and so dark Dick could see his miniaturized reflection in them.

“Dick,” he said, in a deadly serious tone, “if you were a girl, I wouldn’t touch you with a goddamn fishing rod. You’d be ugly as _fuck_.” He held the expression for all of two seconds, then he sputtered a chuckle, and Dick bowed his head over Nix’s shoulder and followed suit, conceding that yes, okay, fair enough, he probably wouldn’t have been the prettiest flower in the bunch, but that was a rude thing to say to a lady.

They stayed like that for a few, infinite minutes. Time curdled and stopped around them, leaving them still and cosy in the middle of the foggy room. Nix’s heart beated in his throat too fast, too strong.

“We should go to sleep,” Dick murmured to the side of Nix’s neck, dreaming of dragging Nix to bed and not waking up alone for once, but Nix turned his head towards the table and shook it slowly, mumbling something about not being tired.

“I want a bath,” he added.

Dick pictured him in the steaming tub, cigarette in one hand, bottle in the other, drinking himself to oblivion until the water turned cold.

“I’m thinking,” Dick said, touching Nix’s jaw, “that I could use one too.”

  
  
  


  


**_31 December 1944, Bois Jacques_**  


Nix made it back to his foxhole ten minutes before midnight.

He found Dick wrapped in blankets all the way up to his nose, curled up tight with his knees up to his chest, and only his closed eyes visible under the rim of his helmet. The foxhole was narrow and long like a grave, large enough for a man to stretch his legs and even lie down if he faced the right way, but Dick was curled up on one side of it, with enough space left for another man to sit next to him.

Nix folded up the tarp and let himself fall into the hole with the ease given by practice, despite his muscles having turned rigid from the long hours out in the cold. It was becoming too familiar, this set of movements, almost like opening the covers and slipping into bed. Dick always curled up on the same side of the foxhole, and for the first time Nix looked at the three-foot-square space on Dick’s right and felt like he was indeed sneaking in after a late night, his side of the bed empty and cold with a warm body asleep next to it.

Not for long. Dick stirred and snapped his head in alarm, but Nix touched his shoulder and said, “It’s me,” and Dick relaxed.

“What’s the time?” Dick mumbled, fishing out his left arm and patting the bundle of blankets for his torchlight.

“Close to midnight.” Nix tugged at the topmost blanket, trying to pry it open. “Budge up a little.”

“Mm. You’re early,” Dick observed, moving his weight off his right side to allow Nix to slip inside the warm cocoon. Which was true enough, since Nix never made it back before two or three in the morning. Nix suspected that Dick’s sleep cycles were tuned in to the interruption, expecting it like one would expect the milk float in the early hours.

“Yeah. Thought I’d be home in time for the celebrations.”

“What—Ah,” Dick murmured. “Did you tell them?”

“To be ready for the fireworks. Yes.”

“All right.”

“The rest of ’em are tucked in,” Nix added, because he knew that Dick would want to hear it. “They send their greetings, by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Under his helmet, Dick drew in a slow breath. “I don’t know what’s worse. When they go at it for hours, or when it’s dead quiet.” He paused. “Like now.”

“Won’t be for long,” Nix observed lightly. He rubbed his gloved hands under the blanket, more out of habit than in hope of actually warming them up.

“And then?”

“And then we pick up what’s left.”

Dick scoffed, but didn’t say anything.

“Come on, Dick,” Nix bumped the side of his helmet playfully into Dick’s. “You’ve gotta keep the morale up.”

“What for?” Dick retorted, in a rare display of out-of-character grimness.

“The hell do I know? For the men.”

“Well, I don’t see any in here.”

Nix clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “I see. One indulges in a bit of sodomy once or twice and just like that, he gets his manhood card revoked. Honestly—”

“Oh, shut up,” Dick snorted.

“You shut up,” Nix replied. “Are you gonna make me play the optimist here?”

“You are an optimist, Lew,” Dick reminded him.

“Maybe back at HQ, but on the line? You’re the one with the positive outlook. The go-getter, the leader of men. I trudge in your shadow with a headache and a magazine of bad jokes.”

“That’s not even—”

“—half of which you’ve taken to stealing from me. Don’t think that I haven’t noticed.”

“Nix,” Dick interrupted him with mock exasperation. “I’ll cheer up if you stop talking.”

Nix grinned in the dark. He adjusted his position, scooting a little lower on his back so that he could rest his cheek on Dick’s shoulder—a tight fit with the helmets and all, but marginally more comfortable—and set himself to wait.

In the silence, Dick’s slow breathing was the only sound of note. Nix could feel, rather than see, the other man’s chest move up and down under the blankets. It was steady and strong, yet with a hint of strain at the bottom of his lungs that was new and mildly worrying, like something wasn’t fully right in there. Nix dug his way under the blankets until he found Dick’s hand, squeezed it firmly, and didn’t let go.

At midnight sharp, friendly artillery started singing, and for all that they were expecting it, when the first rounds dropped Nix felt both Dick and himself stiffen up and brace. Flares and mortar shots whistled high above their heads and landed somewhere to the east; soon after, the incoming barrage hissed and blasted in the opposite direction.

Nix took the flask out of his coat and uncapped it swiftly with one hand.

“Happy New fucking Year!” he shouted above a minor halestorm of mortar rounds.

“Happy New Year, Nix.”

“Here’s to a better one,” Nix said, raising the flask in a mock toast. He didn’t offer, but it was not like Dick would have accepted anyway. He sucked in a minuscule drop to get the taste on the tip of his tongue, planning to stop there; the smell would linger on his lips for a little longer, and it would be better than nothing, and he would have saved the last drop for another day. But once he started he found that he couldn’t stop; his mouth refused to part from the flask, and his wrist pushed it bottom-up almost against his will. The last sip covered his tongue in a thin layer; Nix kept it there, not swallowing, hesitant to put an end to it. The alcoholic vapors filled his nose. Finally, once his tongue started to burn, he gave in and pushed the lukewarm scotch down his throat.

It tasted like regret, and it tasted goddamn great.

Dick had said something. “Hm?”

Dick’s fingers twitched in Nix’s grip. “I said, it wasn’t all bad.”

“What, last year?”

“Yeah.”

“If you forget Normandy and Carentan and goddamn _Market Garden_ —Jesus,” Nix swore, “I’ll sooner take another ’43. Sobel and all.”

“I’m not saying it was good. I’m saying it wasn’t _all_ bad,” Dick repeated more slowly, the faintest, vaguest, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hint of mischief pouring into his voice.

Nix twisted his head upwards. A tear in the tarp cover let in a narrow sliver of moonlight, which accentuated the dips and shadows on Dick’s face rather than illuminating it. Dick’s chapped lips were just a couple inches—and a complicated maneuver—away.

“Good to see you giving that positive outlook thing a shot.”

“Someone suggested it,” Dick shrugged.

Nix leaned a little more heavily on Dick’s shoulder. “I guess Paris wasn’t all bad either,” he offered, a calculated risk. They hadn’t talked about Paris ever since they’d made it back.

“Not all,” Dick agreed softly.

Nix considered his next words through a particularly long sequence of mortar rounds. Certain things had to be pulled from Dick’s mouth like teeth; and sometimes, after a great deal of pulling, Nix would find that he’d been wrong, that there had been nothing there in the first place. But Nix knew that velvety undertone, the way it slithered and crept under Dick’s words, suggesting the words he would not say.

“You think about it? I mean—the good parts.”

“Yeah,” was the quiet reply. For a moment it seemed that Dick would say no more, that he’d leave it to Nix to take the next step forward or drop it altogether, but then, from the depths of his scarf: “You?”

“Sometimes,” Nix confessed. “When—”

Dick turned his head a fraction, mutely waiting for Nix to finish the sentence. Nix let out a soft, self-deprecating chuckle, barely a puff of air.

“When it’s real bad; real cold. It’s—You know. Keeps me warm.”

“I know,” Dick murmured. “It was nice.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

Dick shifted around a little, as if trying to find a more comfortable position. Their hands were still joined, Dick’s right and Nix’s left, finally warm under all the layers. Nix maneuvered them so that they rested on Dick’s belly instead of in the slot between their bodies.

“We’ll go back,” he promised to Dick’s throat. “After—,” he stopped and quickly steered the sentence in a different direction, “—this. Once they rotate us back. I’ll take you.”

“Yeah?” Dick’s voice took on a playful tone, and Nix knew he’d gotten him hooked. “Same place?”

“Best in town. You know what, though? I’ll do you one better. I want a fireplace.”

“You tempter,” Dick sighed.

“We’ll have it started for us,” Nix continued. “Nice and hot. And I mean real hot, _blazing_ hot. I wanna be sweating buckets by the end.” Nix’s free hand, his right hand, trailed off to Dick’s leg, dipped brazenly under the hem of the coat and climbed his inner thigh almost all the way up. He squeezed, and waited.

“ _Oh_ ,” Dick breathed, an ambiguous little sound that could mean _yes_ or _no_. He didn’t move, though, didn’t clarify. Nix didn’t move either, enjoying how the warmth of Dick’s skin slowly diffused through the leather of his glove.

He figured they had reached the tipping point. If there was something for Nix to gain at the end of this, Dick would let him continue; if he’d been wrong, Dick would be sure to let him know.

Nix went all in.

“At some point,” he said, carefully choosing his words, “we’d probably want to take off our clothes.”

Dick swallowed, the fluttering of his Adam’s apple nothing but a momentary ripple in the bundled fabric of his scarf. He held perfectly still, like a living statue.

“Because it’d be hot,” he reasoned. His voice sounded a little muddy, like his tongue was stuck to his palate.

“So hot,” Nix confirmed readily. “Too hot. I’ve got half a mind to complain to the concierge later.”

“No,” Dick said. “I like it like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. About those clothes, then.”

Dick hummed an encouraging sound. Emboldened, Nix’s fingers wrapped a little tighter around Dick’s thigh; his thumb stroked the hollow at the hinge of his thigh, dragging along the crease of his trousers.

“Jacket first. Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“Shirt next.”

“Suspenders,” Dick corrected. “You’re forgetting—”

“Yes. I’ll do those first. And your tie, too.”

“ _My_ tie?” Dick repeated.

“Well, yes.”

“Oh. You’re taking off _my_ clothes.”

“Yes, I am,” Nix confirmed, frowning at the confusion. “I mean, if you—”

“No, I—Yes. Sure. I like that.”

Nix took a quick breath through his nose, feeling like he was losing narrative steam. The last thing he wanted now was to get stuck in a prolonged description of items of clothing.

“Look, uh, let’s call this part done, okay?”

“So,” Dick said, voice rumbling in his throat like gravel, “you’ve got all your clothes on, and I’m wearing nothing?”

The image went straight to Nix’s crotch like a beam of light running through his body. “Yeah,” he breathed.

As if he’d been waiting for just that confirmation, Dick rotated his body inwards. The movement pushed Nix’s own hand a little higher on Dick’s thigh, right at the edge of his crotch, and Dick sighed softly in his scarf but didn’t linger. His left hand dug under Nix’s coat, mimicking the journey of Nix’s hand up his thigh. Instead of stopping like Nix had, though, deft fingers reached for Nix’s belt and unfastened it in two seconds flat. Next, he attacked Nix’s trouser buttons, one after another, with a marksman’s precision.

“Go on,” Dick said. His hand retreated, and his voice came muffled from around the fingertip of the glove he’d bit to pull it off. When he dipped his gloveless hand into Nix’s pants, Nix sighed fondly. He needed a moment to get back to where he’d left off.

“I’ll be on the floor,” he said, now resting his hand fully on Dick’s crotch. “You, on the bed.”

“Yes,” Dick murmured.

“Legs up,” Nix continued, unfastening Dick’s belt and trousers. “I wanna see everything.”

“Can you see?”

“Oh yeah.” It was easier now, picturing it in his mind. He ran his fist over Dick’s cock, taking stock of its length and its weight and its feel. It felt like ages since the last time; and from how hard Dick was, he suspected the feeling was mutual. “Jesus,” he murmured. “You’ve missed me, haven’t you?”

“Floor, bed,” Dick recapped, undeterred, steering him back to the storytelling. “Then what?”

“I’m,” Nix continued, “well. Blowing you, I guess.”

Dick waited for him to continue, and Nix hesitated. He’d followed an inspiration down the rabbit hole, but now he felt out of his depth. He’d never done anything like this before. Sure, he’d had the occasional saucy conversation with the occasional adventurous girl, and often in the heat of the moment he’d heard himself say things he wouldn’t care to repeat when the moment passed—but _this_. How was Dick taking it in stride? Was this something that he—? No. No, no. Not tight-lipped, poised, dignified Dick Winters. But maybe _someone_ , some silver-tongued devil with a penchant for dirty talk, some lucky faggot who’d wormed his way into Dick’s bed and hadn’t known to fucking _keep him_ —maybe this joke of a man had once or twice whispered a filthy story into Dick’s ear and brought him off just like Nix was clumsily trying to do now.

The thought lit his face up with something not far from righteous anger. He bent his head away from Dick and pulled the strap off his chin; next, he dropped the helmet into the darkness on his right. His movement less constricted, he dipped his nose at the edge of Dick’s scarf, right under Dick’s ear.

Dick squirmed. “Nix, that’s not saf—”

“Two minutes. All I need,” Nix promised, and he knew fully well that bragging wasn’t the way, but he had to start building his confidence somewhere. “Where—Yes. Your cock. In my mouth.” He gave Dick’s actual cock a little pull, and it was sticky and dry and not at all as smooth as one could hope, but it would have to do. Dick, at any rate, sighed like that rough touch was all he’d been waiting for.

“I’m gonna give it a good, long suck. Get it nice and wet. And then I’m gonna do that thing with my tongue—You know the one I mean?” He rubbed his thumb on the little strip of connecting skin at the base of the head of Dick’s cock to remind him, and Dick whimpered under his breath. Nix inched closer, rubbing against Dick’s hand in his pants, and breathed in Dick’s ear. “Hands are free. Suggestions?”

Dick pulled his head away from Nix’s hot breath, like it was too much, but leaned back in a moment later.

“You know what I like,” he breathed back.

“Right,” Nix murmured, lips brushing the side of Dick’s neck. “Since I’m going to fuck you, might as well start ahead. Get a lay of the land, as it were.”

Dick made a tiny little strangled sound in his nose.

“Now, I suspect,” Nix continued, gratified, “that this isn’t the first time today. I’m thinking—tell me if I’m wrong, but I distinctly remember ravishing you this morning.”

“Yes,” Dick agreed readily. “I think you’re right.”

“It sure feels like I did.” He hummed a pleased little sound in Dick’s ear, like he’d found something he liked. “Here. Nice and easy. In, out. Can you feel that?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Nix sniffed. Dick’s hand was moving in his pants, and the space inside the blanket was turning hot. He rubbed back, just a little, enough to feel it but not to be distracted.

“I think,” he said slowly, dragging his thumb over the head of Dick’s cock, “I want to put my tongue in there.”

“ _Lew_ ,” Dick choked, squeezing his eyes shut.

“You like that?” Nix pushed, feeling almost smug at the reaction. “Want more?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Or do you want to be fucked?” Dick’s grip tightened around his cock, but he didn’t answer. “How do you want to be fucked?”

Dick exhaled a ragged chuckle, like there was something funny to the question, and his eyes fluttered open. The answer, however, was dead serious. “Face to face. I—,” he swallowed, “I had a dream like that once.”

“How conjugal,” Nix joked, trying to defuse a sudden rush of emotion, lest their little game end too early. “Okay. Do you need some—”

“I’m ready,” Dick said, sounding a little urgent now. “Just—” He tilted his head forward, hesitated for a second, then extricated the hand that was not jerking Nix’s off and ran his fingers through Nix’s greasy hair, drew him closer, and kissed him. Their bodies tensed together in the kiss, and Nix’s mind swam for a moment in a sea of warmth and wetness before he could get a firm grip on himself.

He pulled back just a little, just enough to speak.

“I’m inside you,” he said on Dick’s mouth. “I’m fucking you. Can you feel it?”

“Do you like it? Do you—”

“You joking? I fucking love it. It’s perfect. So goddamn hot. Are you close?”

“God,” Dick grunted under Nix’s hand, straining not to give up too soon.

“I want you to come like this. Okay? With me inside. Like in Paris. Jesus Christ, that was incredible. Can you do that for me? Dick?”

He was just a couple of pulls away. Nix felt sweat pool on his upper lip, his own need tugging at the margins of his concentration, but he wouldn’t be distracted. He poured a few more heated nothings into Dick’s ear and that was it, Dick threw his head back and groaned softly and suddenly Nix’s hand was covered in a hot, sticky mess. Triumphant and desperate for release, Nix rubbed his aching erection in Dick’s loose fist, and followed.

Artillery had gone quiet for some time, and soon someone—not Harry, Harry was gone, but maybe Lipton—would come look for the XO. At that point, he’d find the two of them huddling together for warmth, perfectly decent, possibly half asleep. That is, if Nix managed to convince Dick that he didn’t need to go check on the men himself later. But for now, nothing and no one moved.

At some point Nix figured that Dick had dozed off, and he adjusted his position to try and do the same. As if woken by the movement, Dick sighed contentedly, the way one would after a large meal.

“Thanks, Lew,” he said.

Nix scoffed. “Did you just thank me for jerking you off?”

“I meant it in more general terms, but—Yes.”

“Mm. You’re welcome.”

Dick was silent then, and Nix realized from his minute body tension that he meant to say something else, but he was struggling to pick the right words. He pictured Dick’s furrowed brow, the rigid line of his lips as he formed the sentence.

“Sometimes I don’t know if—” Dick paused. “All this sitting around. Waiting to be overrun. Wiped out. And nothing—,” his voice almost broke there, “nothing feels, not _good_ , I could take that, but—It’s just. White. White all over.” He took a shaky breath. “So, yeah. Thank you.”

The terrible truth that Nix was completely, hopelessly out of booze chose that moment to hit him. It suddenly felt like everything had gone dark, a dry, cold kind of emptiness like a desert at night. His mouth like sandpaper, Nix closed his eyes and thought of Paris so hard that he almost tasted onion soup, cabernet, bordelaise sauce—and deep under it all, the tangier notes of Dick’s skin and sweat and semen on his tongue.

“You ever need a refill, you come to me,” he said breezily. “This is no place for _ennui_.”

Dick took a long breath. “What, this frozen hell?” he finally shot back, sounding every bit as snarky as Lewis Nixon on a good day, and Nix couldn’t see it but he could totally _hear_ the tiny smirk lifting the corner of Dick’s mouth.

He gave in to a delighted chuckle. “I’m starting to think that you’re nothing without me, Winters.”

“Well, that,” Dick acknowledged quietly, “is the problem, isn’t it?”

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to anybody who's still following this series despite my very, very slow progress. I'm stupidly attached to this series and committed to finishing it, and any form of moral support is terribly appreciated. Let me know if you liked it!


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